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. Select the correct answer from above options

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