Add EBS to Ubuntu EC2 Instance

Question

I'm having a problem connecting EBS volume to my Ubuntu EC2 Instance.

Here's what I did:

1. From the Amazon AWS Console, I created an EBS 150GB volume and attached it to an Ubuntu "version" EC2 instance. Under the EBS volume properties, "Attachment" shows: "[my Ubuntu instance id]:/dev/sdf (attached)"

2. 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

3. 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

Questions:

Q1: Based on point 1 (above), why was the volume mapped to 'dev/sdf' when it's really mapped to '/dev/xvdf'?

Q2: What else do I need to do to get the EBS volume loaded? I thought it'll just take care of everything for me when I attach it to an instance.

Answer 1

Since this is a new volume, first let us format the EBS volume. So this is the process:

1. First, create an EBS volume

2. Attach EBS volume to /dev/sdf (particular device number is EC2’s external name).

3. Format file system /dev/xvdf (particular device number is Ubuntu’s internal name):

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/xvdf

Note Format only if this is a new volume with no data. It might become difficult or impossible to retrieve data once it is done.

4. Mount file system (with an 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