EBS Mounting Guide

EBS Mounting Guide

After you attach an Amazon EBS volume to your instance, it is exposed as a block device. You can format the volume with any file system and then mount it. After you make the EBS volume available for use, you can access it in the same ways that you access any other volume. Any data written to this file system is written to the EBS volume and is transparent to applications using the device. See these docs for more details:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-using-volumes.html

Format and mount an attached volume

1. Connect to your instance using SSH. For more information, see Connect to your Linux instance.

2. The device could be attached to the instance with a different device name than you specified in the block device mapping. For more information, see Device naming on Linux instances. Use the lsblk command to view your available disk devices and their mount points.

   lsblk
   df
   

3. Determine whether there is a file system on the volume. New volumes are raw block devices, and you must create a file system on them before you can mount and use them. Volumes that were created from snapshots likely have a file system on them already; if you create a new file system on top of an existing file system, the operation overwrites your data.

   sudo file -s /dev/xvdf
   

4. Only if the volume is empty, use the mkfs -t command to create a file system on the volume. Important: doing this will delete any existing data on the volume.

   sudo mkfs -t xfs /dev/xvdf
   

   If you get an error that mkfs.xfs is not found, use the following command to install the XFS tools and then repeat the previous command:

   sudo yum install xfsprogs
   

5. Create a directory and mount the volume.

   sudo mkdir /mnt/data0
   sudo mount /dev/xvdf /mnt/data0
   

   Note: to unmount us the following.

   sudo umount /mnt/data0
   

6. Grant permission on the directory

   sudo chown -R ec2-user /mnt/data0
   

7. Check the newly mounted volume.

   df
   

   Note: if you reboot your instance you will need to remount unless you use auto-remount.

Auto-Remount After Reboot

1. Use the blkid command to find the UUID of the device.

   sudo blkid
   /dev/xvdf: UUID="549af139-1164-47e4-bfb6-4e15e70fb5ad" TYPE="xfs"
   

   For Ubuntu use:

   sudo lsblk -o +UUID
   

2. Edit /etc/fstab to make the settings persist.

   sudo nano /etc/fstab
   

   Add the following line (note: your uuid and type):

   UUID=549af139-1164-47e4-bfb6-4e15e70fb5ad  /mnt/data0  xfs  defaults,nofail  0  2
   

   For Ubuntu use:

   UUID=549af139-1164-47e4-bfb6-4e15e70fb5ad  /mnt/data0  xfs  defaults,nofail,nobootwait  0  2
   

3. Reboot and then check to see that your mount is still attached.

   sudo reboot
   lsblk
   df