Add EBS to Ubuntu EC2 Instance

Question

I'm having problem connecting EBS volume to my Ubuntu EC2 Instance. Here's what I did: From the Amazon AWS Console, I created a EBS 150GB volume and attached it to an Ubuntu 11.10 EC2 instance. Under the EBS volume properties, "Attachment" shows: "[my Ubuntu instance id]:/dev/sdf (attached)" Tried mounting the drive on the Ubuntu box, and it told me "mount: /dev/sdf is not a block device" `sudo mount /dev/sdf /vol` So I checked with fdisk and tried to mount from the new location and it told me it wasn't the right file system. `sudo fdisk -l` `sudo mount -v -t ext4 /dev/xvdf /vol` the error: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/xvdf, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so "dmesg | tail" told me it gave the following error: EXT4-fs (sda1): VFS: Can't find ext4 filesystem I also tried putting the configurations into /etc/fstab file as instructed on http://www.webmastersessions.com/how-to…

Accepted Answer

Since this is a new volume, you need to format the EBS volume (block device) with a file system between step 1 and step 2. So the entire process with your sample mount point is:

Create EBS volume.

Attach EBS volume to `/dev/sdf` (EC2's external name for this particular device number).

Format file system `/dev/xvdf` (Ubuntu's internal name for this particular device number):

```
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/xvdf
```

Only format the file system if this is a new volume with no data on it. Formatting will make it difficult or impossible to retrieve any data that was on this volume previously.

Mount file system (with update to /etc/fstab so it stays mounted on reboot):

```
sudo mkdir -m 000 /vol
echo "/dev/xvdf /vol auto noatime 0 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
sudo mount /vol
```

Add EBS to Ubuntu EC2 Instance

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