When you first set your Windows instance up, you get the barest of bones possible. For example, no IIS! Likelihood is, you probably want that installed. So as usual, you add/remove programs and install the windows components. 

The problem arises when it asks you for the Windows 2003 disk, and you aren’t exactly sitting next to the machine are you? 

Amazon have thought of this for you though, they have a number of media available for you to mount as drives on your instance, much in the same way we created and mounted a volume in my previous post yesterday. Using the new AWS console makes it even easier to use!

Follow my tutorial up to the point of where you create the volume, and instead of leaving the Snapshot dropdown set to “No Snapshot”, open up the dropdown:

As you can see, there are many options – but you’re interested in the last 4 in the list. Select the snapshot most relevant to the server install on your instance, and hit “Create”. (Select a size of 2GB for the volume). Once created, all you need to do is mount it as per my previous tutorial and you’re done. Because it’s an already formatted partition, it should appear on your Windows instance as a new drive within a few seconds.

You can now point the add/remove programs wizard to this location to install additional Windows components. Just don’t forget to unmount it and delete the volume once you are done, otherwise Amazon will charge you for it!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 and is filed under AWS, Development, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.