Mounting Old EBS Volume to the new Instance - Amazon EC2 - amazon-ec2

1) I had an instance and sudo commands were not working do to some mistakes on this instance
so i had to create a new instance.
2) I want to use old EBS volume with new instance and to stop old instance.
3) I created a new instance (New EBS Volume is created automatically with new instance)
4) I created snapshot of old volume and attached with new instance.
5) So two EBS volumes are attached with new instance.
6) When i login using SSH into new instance, i don't see old data anywhere.
7) I want every old data on new instance.
my question is.....
how i can use old volume with new instance?
please help me.. i am trying it from last 10 hours continuously :(..

What you need to do is mount the old volume on the new instance. Go to the Amazon EC2 control panel, and click "Volumes" (under Elastic Block Store). Look at the attachment information for the old EBS volume. This will be something like <instance id> (<instance name>):/dev/sdg
Make a note of the path given here, so that'd be /dev/sdg in the example above. Then use SSH and connect to your new instance, and type mkdir /mnt/oldvolume and then mount /dev/sdg /mnt/oldvolume (or whatever the path given in the control panel was). Your files should now be available under /mnt/oldvolume. If this does not solve your problem, please post again with the output of your df command after doing all of this.
So, to recap, to use an EBS volume on an instance, you need to attach it to that instance using the control panel (or API tools), and then mount it on the instance itself.

Related

Add instance to a Volume in Amazon EC2

I have created an instance m2.2xlarge which works fine.
I am trying to add this instance to a volume. Volume created fine and see in list of volumes.
The status of this volume shows up as "available".
In the "Action" - Attach volume and then select instance from drop down list- this above instance does not show up. I have another micro instance which shows up fine in the drop down list.
Why is the m2 large instance not showing up in the drop down list (for available instances)?
Is this the way to add a volume to a new instance?

AWS EC2: Instance from my own Windows AMI is not reachable

I am windows user and wanted to use a spot instance using my own EBS windows AMI. For this I have followed these steps:
I had my own on-demand instance with specific settings
Using AWS console I used option "Create Image EBS" to create EBS based windows AMI. IT worked and AMI created successfully
Then using this new AMI I launched a spot medium instance that was created well and now running with status checks passed.
After waiting an hour or more I am trying to connect it using windows 7 RDC client but is not reachable with client tool's standard error that either computer is not reachable or not powered on.
I have tried to achieve this goal and created/ deleted many volums, instances, snapshots everything but still unsuccessful. Doesn't anybody else have any solution to this problem?
Thanks
Basically what's happening is that the existing administrator password (and other user authentication information) for Windows is only valid in the original instance, and can't be used on the new "hardware" that you're launching the AMI on (even though it's all virtualized).
This is why RDP connections will fail to newly launched instances, as will any attempts to retrieve the administrator password. Unfortunately you have no choice but to shut down the new instances you've been trying to connect to because you won't be able to do anything with them.
For various reasons the Windows administrator password cannot be preserved when running a snapshot of the operating system on different hardware (even virtualized hardware) - this is a big part of the reason why technologies like Active Directory exist, so that user authentication information is portable between machines and networks.
It sounds like you did all the steps necessary to get this working except for one - you never took any steps to cause a new password to be assigned to your newly-launched instances based on the original AMI you created.
To fix this, BEFORE turning your instance into a custom AMI that can be used to launch new instances, you need to (in the original instance) run the Ec2ConfigService Settings tool (found in the start menu when remoted into the original instance using RDP), and enable the option to generate a new password on next reboot. Save this setting change.
Then when you do create an AMI from the original instance, and use that AMI to launch new instances, they will each boot up to your custom Windows image but will choose their own random administrator password.
At this point you can go to your ec2 dashboard and retrieve the newly-generated password for the new instance based on the old AMI, and you'll also be able to download the RDP file used to connect to it.
One additional note is that Amazon warns that it can take upwards of 30 minutes for the retrieval of an administrator password after launching a new instance, however in my previous experience I've never had to wait more than a few minutes to be able to get it.
Your problem is most likely that the security group you used to launch the AMI does not have RDP (TCP port #3389) enabled.
When you launch the windows AMI for the first time, AWS will populate the quicklaunch with this port enabled. However, when you launch the subsequent AMI, you will have to ensure that this port is open for your security group.

How to create a EC2 instance from snapshot in cloudformation?

I'd like to specify the snapshot id which would be used to create a root device image for a EC2 instance created with cloudformation. How do I do that?
I could only find a way to make volume from a snapshot, but no way to use it in the instance.
If you want to use an EBS snapshot as the basis of the root disk (EBS volume) for an instance, you need to first register the snapshot as an AMI (e.g., using ec2-register).
Make sure to specify the correct architecture and kernel (AKI) when you register the snapshot as an AMI.
Alternatively, instead of taking a snapshot and registering it as separate steps, you could use the ec2-create-image command/API/console function to perform the snapshot and registration in a single step. This also takes care of picking the right architecture, kernel, and other parameters.
Once you have an AMI, you can tell CloudFormation to use that AMI when running a new instance.
I concur. This has nothing to do with cloudformation, but I just did this following a crippling 'do-release-upgrade'. It's just a matter of creating an image from the snapshot, and in my case making sure to change the virtualization type to "hardware assisted virtualization" (HVM). Then you can just launch the resulting image (AMI).

AWS console not showing all instances during volume attach

I do the following using AWS web console:
Attach EBS volume-A to instance-A. Make some changes to data on volume-A and detach it
Launch new instance-B (in the same zone as instance-A)
Try attach volume-A to the new instance-B. But the new instance does not appear in the instances list during attach volume process (dialog box).
If I try the same attach using command line EC2 API (volume-A and instance-B), it works fine!
Do you know if this is a bug in AWS web console or am I doing something wrong in the console? Tried page refresh in Step #3 but it still would not list the new instance.
In order to attach, both volumes has to be in the same zone. So if you are going to attach a volume into a instance check the zone of the instance's attached volume. If those are not matching create a new instance with the same zone as the zone of the volume that you need to attached.
The volume and the instance have to be in the same region AND the same zone.
If you have a volume in us-east-1a and the instance in us-east-1b, you would need to move the volume to us-east-1b to make it work.
Even I had faced this problem yesterday and a day before. It looks like Amazon problem with their cache. Not sure WHY.
To bring back the stuff as is, I had to sign-out and make sure things are good. But it's always good to work with CLI, works better.
Although the user interface may not list the instance ID, you can attempt to add the volume anyway. If it's genuinely impossible (rather than a cache issue) you will get an error message.
Paste in the instance ID (i-xxxxxxx) manually then type your mount point (e.g. /dev/sdf) and click Attach.
For the benefit of others: some instance types do not support encrypted volumes, which may be why the instance doesn't appear in the list. I get the following error:
Error attaching volume: 'vol-12341234' is encrypted and 't2.medium' does not support encrypted volumes.

Creating an ec2 AMI with an ebs backed instance - is it possible

Following the instructions at http://aws.amazon.com/articles/1663?_encoding=UTF8&jiveRedirect=1 I created an instance with mysql's dbs running on an EBS volume.
I've been installing other software on the instance's filesystem (not the EBS volume) and would like to be able to save the whole it as an AMI.
In Elasticfox, both AMI commands were greyed out.
Is it not possible to do this?
I am not so familiar with ElasticFOX, but in general you cannot create an AMI of an EC2 instance created from instance-store explicitly. You need a series of ec2-ami-tools to create one. I have wrote a script which I used to create an AMI. Feel free to use.
Copy the following script:
https://github.com/rakesh-sankar/Tools/blob/master/AmazonAWS/AMI/CreateAMI.sh
-make sure, you update the following before use
Imagename Shortname
Path to priavetKey
Path to certificateKey
S3 User-id (in general, this is yourAWS account ID)
Bucket Name
Path to JavaHome
Give permission to the file.
chmod +x createAMI.sh
./createAMI.sh
It should create an AMI image under your account and register it with the name you have given.

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