Next up, choose “Volumes” on the left hand control panel:
The next screen you see is your control panel showing all your EBS volumes. If you’re following this, you probably don’t have any… Panic not! Hit the “Create Volume” button to create one:
This brings up a new window with some simple options, size, zone and snapshot. Important (at least this only worked for me when I tried), I had to create my EBS volume in the same zone as my Windows instance, so choose that. Size is an obvious choice. Snapshot is an interesting one which I will show you in my next post. Just leave it selected at “No Snapshot” for now:
Click “Create” and off it goes. Give it some time (You need to force a refresh of the console by using the refresh button in the console). Once its complete you will see your volume listed as “Available”:
Great, next up we need to attach it to our instance, so hit the “Attach Volume” button after selecting your volume:
A new window appears again, use the defaults and click “Attach”:
Cool, we’re done. However, although the volume is attached to Windows, it needs to be formatted before you can use it. Goto your Windows instance via Remote Desktop Connection… Once on the desktop goto Start -> Run and type “diskmgmt.msc” without the quotation marks. Select OK. This should open up the Disk Management console.
Right click on the Amazon disk at the bottom of the list and choose “Initialize Disk”. A pop up will appear, just choose “OK”:
Next you need to right click on the Amazon volume and select “New Partition”:
A wizard appears, just accept the defaults, other than you can change the disk letter if you want:
Finish up the wizard, and Windows will now format the partition. Hopefully, once complete you will have a nice healthy partition on a new drive.
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You are correct, a volume must live in the same data center as the instance. Just like a physical hard drive.
THANKS! This was very helpful.
Add two steps for windows 2008 server on Amazon. In place of creating new partition you
a. right click and choose Online
a. Right click and choose Initialize (I don’t know why you have to initialize AND go online but you do)
c. rick click the drive and “Create simple Volume”
now you can follow the wizard and the rest of the steps are pretty much the same.