Add EBS to Ubuntu EC2 Instance

Question

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

Here's what I did:

1. 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)"

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

I also tried putting the configurations into /etc/fstab file as instructed on http://www.webmastersessions.com/how-to-attach-ebs-volume-to-amazon-ec2-instance, but still gave same not the right file system error.

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 a instance

Answer 1

you are creating a new volume, so are supposed to format the EBS volume with a file system after your step 1. Try this, entire process with your sample mount point is: 

1. Create EBS volume.

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

3. Format file system /dev/xvdf (Ubuntu's internal name for this particular device number): sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/xvdf

Note:- You should format a file system only if it is a new volume with no data. After Formatting it is very difficult or impossible to any data that was on this volume previously.

4. 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

I hope this helps you:)