6. Mounting a Storage Volume on Your Instance

After creating an instance, any data volumes that were attached to the instance must be mounted on the instance. To mount a storage volume, after logging in to the instance using SSH, do the following:

1. List the devices available on the instance:
2. ls /dev/xvd*
3. Device names start from /dev/xvdb and are determined by the index number that you assigned while attaching a storage volume. For example, if you attached a storage volume at index 1, the volume gets the device name, /dev/xvdb. The storage volume at index 2 would be /dev/xvdc, the storage volume at index 3 would be /dev/xvdd, and so on.
4. Determine the device name corresponding to the disk index number that you want to mount.
5. For example, if you want to mount the storage volume that you had attached at index 2, the device name would be /dev/xvdc.
6. Use a tool such as mkfs to create a file system on the storage volume.
7. For example, to create an ext3 file system on /dev/xvdc, enter the following command:
8. sudo mkfs -t ext3 /dev/xvdc
9. Note: If the Extended File System utilities are not available on your instance, you’ll see a message such as the following:
10. mkfs.ext3: No such file or directory
11. To install the Extended File System utilities, enter the following command:
12. sudo yum install e4fsprogs
13. Create a mount point directory on your instance.
14. For example, to create the mount point /mnt/store, enter the following command:
15. sudo mkdir /mnt/store
16. Mount the storage volume on the mount point that you just created.
17. For example, to mount the device /dev/xvdc at the /mnt/store directory, enter the following command:
18. sudo mount /dev/xvdc /mnt/store
19. If you prefer, you can specify the disk UUID instead of the device name in the mount command.
20. To find out the UUID of the disks attached to your instance, use the blkid command.
21. To make the mount persistent across instance restarts, edit the /etc/fstab file and add the mount as an entry in that file, as shown in the following example:
22. /dev/xvdc /mnt/store ext3 defaults 0 0