Tag Archives: EBS

Re-mounting an AWS EBS Volume to another instance

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This is handy for a lot of reasons, like rescuing disk data or fixing boot configuration. The detail is here at the Amazon documentation. The outline of steps is below:

  1. Stop the original instance.
  2. Detach the volume from the stopped instance.
  3. Create a new instance of similar type to the original instance and assign the same security group.
  4. Start the new instance.
  5. Attach the detached original volume to the new instance as /dev/xvdf
  6. Login to the new instance, create mount point and mount the original volume.
  7. Once completed, umount the original volume and detach from the new instance.
  8. Attach the original volume to the original instance as /dev/sda1
  9. Start the original instance.

Essential commands for this, based on Ubuntu. Some steps above are done in the AWS Console GUI.

ubuntu:~$ lsblk
 NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
 xvda 202:0 0 8G 0 disk
xvda1 202:1 0 8G 0 part /
 xvdf 202:80 0 10G 0 disk
xvdf1 202:81 0 10G 0 part
ubuntu:~$ sudo file -s /dev/xvdf
 /dev/xvdf: x86 boot sector
ubuntu:~$ sudo mkdir /rescue
ubuntu:~$ sudo mount /dev/xvdf1 /rescue