Attaching raw EBS volume to EC2 instance

If you create a volume manually and then try to attach and mount it to an instance you will notice that the volume is not usable cause it is raw. Of course you will need to format it and then mount it.

It is very basic and simple task but not for beginners. So we will list the attached volumes, check the filesystem (which supposed to be nothing!), create file system, create mount point and mount.

lsblk
sudo file -s /dev/xvdb
sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/xvdb
sudo mkdir mount_point
sudo mount /dev/xvdb mount_point

Extending Linux physical partition in AWS EC2

Once I got to the problem that an old server migrated to AWS had used 100% of available storage. Lucky me, it was in AWS EC2 and I were able to simply create a snapshot of the EBS volume and then create another volume from the snapshot which had twice the size of old one.

*It is notable that data lost was intolerable!

Until here was easy, and I thought it is going to remain that way using resize2fs tool. But the tool simply said that there partition is already using full disk size! while there was unused space there. So after some search I found the http://litwol.com/content/fdisk-resizegrow-physical-partition-without-losing-data-linodecom article and adapt it to my case.

The difference of my case was that the server partition was DOS partition and not ex* partition. This is what I did to fix it:

List disks and write down “Start” and “Id” for /dev/xvda1 (These two piece of data are extremely important for successfully finishing the task). In my case Start was 63 and Id was 8e.

fidsk -l

And then delete the partition, and create larger a new one with exact same start point:

fdisk -c=dos -u=sectors /dev/xvdc

(The red characters are my response)

(fdisk) Command (m for help): d
(fdisk) Partition number (1-4): 1
(fdisk) Command (m for help): n
(fdisk) Partition type:
p primary
e extended
Select (default p): p
Partition number (1-4, default 1): 1
First sector (63-40558591, default 63): 63
Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G} (63-40558591, default 40558591): 40558591
(fdisk) Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1-4): 1
Hex Code (type L to list codes): 8e
(fdisk) Command (m for help): w

Now we use resize2fs to finalize everything:

resize2fs /dev/xvdc1

At the end you can check the storage device by “lsblk” or “fdisk -l”.