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Attach an Amazon EBS volume to an instance - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Attach an Amazon EBS volume to an instance

You can attach an available EBS volume to one or more of your instances that is in the same Availability Zone as the volume.

For information about adding EBS volumes to your instance at launch, see Instance block device mapping.

Prerequisites

  • Determine how many volumes you can attach to your instance. For more information, see Instance volume limits.

  • Determine whether you can attach your volume to multiple instances and enable Multi-Attach. For more information, see Attach a volume to multiple instances with Amazon EBS Multi-Attach.

  • If a volume is encrypted, it can only be attached to an instance that supports Amazon EBS encryption. For more information, see Supported instance types.

  • If a volume has an AWS Marketplace product code:

    • The volume can only be attached to a stopped instance.

    • You must be subscribed to the AWS Marketplace code that is on the volume.

    • The configuration (instance type, operating system) of the instance must support that specific AWS Marketplace code. For example, you cannot take a volume from a Windows instance and attach it to a Linux instance.

    • AWS Marketplace product codes are copied from the volume to the instance.

Important

If you attach an io2 volume to an R5b instance, the volume always runs on EBS Block Express. Currently, only R5b instances support io2 Block Express volumes. For more information, see io2 Block Express volumes.

You can attach a volume to an instance using one of the following methods.

Console

To attach an EBS volume to an instance using the console

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose Elastic Block Store, Volumes.

  3. Select an available volume and choose Actions, Attach Volume.

  4. For Instance, start typing the name or ID of the instance. Select the instance from the list of options (only instances that are in the same Availability Zone as the volume are displayed).

  5. For Device, you can keep the suggested device name, or type a different supported device name. For more information, see Device names on Linux instances.

  6. Choose Attach.

  7. Connect to your instance and mount the volume. For more information, see Make an Amazon EBS volume available for use on Linux.

AWS CLI

To attach an EBS volume to an instance using the command line

You can use one of the following commands. For more information about these command line interfaces, see Access Amazon EC2.

Note

In some situations, you may find that a volume other than the volume attached to /dev/xvda or /dev/sda has become the root volume of your instance. This can happen when you have attached the root volume of another instance, or a volume created from the snapshot of a root volume, to an instance with an existing root volume. For more information, see Boot from the wrong volume.