How to Make an Amazon EBS Volume Available for Use

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud: 2009-08-15

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How to Make an Amazon EBS Volume Available for Use

Inside the instance, the Amazon EBS volume is exposed as a normal block device and can be formatted as any file system and mounted.

After making the Amazon EBS volume available for use, you can take snapshots of it for backup purposes or to use as baselines to launch new volumes.

Linux and UNIX

This section describes how to make a volume available to the Linux and UNIX operating system.

To create an ext3 file system on the Amazon EBS volume and mount it as /mnt/data-store

  1. Enter the following command.

                  $ 
              
                 
              
              yes | mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdh

  2. Enter the following command.

                  $ 
              
                 
              
              mkdir /mnt/data-store

  3. Enter the following command.

                  $ 
              
                 
              
              mount /dev/sdh /mnt/data-store

Any data written to this file system is written to the Amazon EBS volume and is transparent to applications using the device.

[Note] Note

To enable the instance to reconnect to an Amazon EBS volume on reboot, add the device to the fstab or create a script that automatically mounts the volume on boot.

Windows

This section describes how to make a volume available to the Windows operating system.

To use an Amazon EBS volume

  1. Log in to your instance using Remote Desktop.

  2. On the taskbar, click Start, and then click Run.

  3. Type diskmgmt.msc and click OK. The Disk Management utility opens.

  4. Right-click the Amazon EBS volume, select New Volume, and follow the on-screen prompts.

    [Note] Note

    If the New Volume option does not appear, select Format.

Any data written to this file system is written to the Amazon EBS volume and is transparent to applications using the device.

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