On Amazon AWS EC2 VPS server it might be useful to mount a 2. hard disk drive. Maybe your primary disk is full. This is how it’s done.
Recover data from a EC2 VPS instance with Ubuntu that won’t boot
Sometimes you need to restore files from a snapshot or a volume that wont boot. In this case the volume could be opened by mounting it as a 2. drive on a temporary EC2 instance. This procedure is useful if your EC2 instance is unable to boot. Then you can set up a new ECS VPS server and mount the non bootable disk as a second disk and extract the files from it. Need help? Don’t hesitate to contact me.
First see if the drive is attached with this command:
sudo fdisk –l
You will get a listing of available drives. If the drive already exist it will reveal itself with this line:
Disk /dev/xvdf: 10.7 GB, 10737418240 bytes
Now format the disk with this command, if you haven’t already done so:
sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/xvdf
Create a directory where the drive should be mounted:
mkdir /mnt
This is it. Now you can mount the drive with the command:
sudo mount /dev/xvdf /mnt
Check if the disk has been mounted correctly with this command:
mount -l
You should get this result:
/dev/xvdf on /mnt1 type ext4 (rw)
Mount on startup
Set the drive to mount automatically on system startup with adding a line to the configuration file:
sudo nano /etc/fstab
and add this line to the file:
/dev/xvdf /mnt1 auto defaults,nobootwait 0 0
Save the file and exit Nano.
Reboot the server to check that everything works correctly
After reboot you can access the new drive with the command:
cd /mnt1
mkdir /www.tbt.no
That’s it.
Your new root folder for Apache is ready for use at the address:
/mnt/www.tbt.no/
Credits
Source for this article is Mikhael Plavskiy
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