How do I attach an Amazon EBS volume to an Amazon EC2 Windows instance?

Resolution

Prerequisites: Make sure that you adhere to the requirements to attach an EBS volume to an EC2 instance. To attach your volume as a root volume, you must first stop the instance.

Configure your instance for a stop and start

Note: When you stop and start an instance, the instance's public IP address changes. It's a best practice to use an Elastic IP address to route external traffic to your instance instead of a public IP address. If you use Amazon Route 53, then you might need to update the Route 53 DNS records when the public IP address changes. A stop and start is different from an instance reboot. For more information, see How EC2 instance stop and start works.

Before you stop and start your instance, take the following actions:

• If your instance uses an instance store, then save the volume data on the instance store to persistent storage. For example, you can save the data to EBS volumes or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets.
  Important: Amazon EC2 deletes instance store data when you stop the instance.
• Create a snapshot of your volume. If you experience issues, then you can use the snapshot to restore your instance.
• Temporarily remove the instance from its Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group so that you don't accidentally terminate the instance when you stop it.
  Note: EC2 Auto Scaling might terminate stopped instances in an Auto Scaling group based on your scale-in protection settings. Instances that you launch with Amazon EMR, AWS CloudFormation, or AWS Elastic Beanstalk might be in an Auto Scaling group.
• Set the instance shutdown behavior to Stop to make sure that the instance doesn't terminate when you stop it.

Attach the volume

Complete the following steps:

1. (Root volumes only) Stop your instance.
2. (Root volumes only) Detach the existing root volume.
3. Attach the volume to the instance. To attach the volume as a root volume, enter /dev/sda1 for Device name. To attach an additional volume to the instance, use an available device name. For instances that are built on the AWS Nitro System, see Map Amazon EBS volumes to NVMe device names.
   Note: You can use a device name for a volume only once. You can't use duplicate device names in Amazon EC2. If you use a duplicate device name, then the operation fails and you receive the following error message:
   "Invalid value '/dev/abc' for unixDevice. Attachment point /dev/abc is already in use."
4. Use Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to connect to your instance.
5. Choose the Start menu, and then open Disk Management.
6. Open the context (right-click) menu for the disk that's set to Offline, and then select Online. If the new empty volume and disk has the "Not Initialized" status, then make the EBS volume available to use on Windows.

Related information

Why isn't my EBS volume increase reflected in my OS or Disk Management?

Best practices for Amazon EC2