Amazon EC2 and EBS disk space problem

Question

I am having a problem reconciling the space available on my EBS volume. According to the AWS console the volume is 50GB and is attached to an instance.

If I ssh to this

Answer 1

Yes, the issue is simple. The volume is only associated with the instance, but not mounted.

Check on the AWS console which drive it is mounted as - most likely /dev/sdf.

Then (on ubuntu):

sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdf
sudo mkdir /ebs
sudo mount /dev/sdf /ebs

The first line formats the volume - using the ext3 file system type. This is pretty standard -- but depending on your usage (e.g. app server, database server, ...) you could also select another one like ext4 or xfs.

The second command creates a mount point and the third mounts it into it. This means that effectively, the new volume will be at /ebs. It should also show up in df now.

Last but not least, maybe also add an entry to /etc/fstab to make it reboot-proof.