Automatically mount an EBS volume upon starting an Amazon EC2 Linux instance

Question

I have an EBS volume (e.g. /dev/sdf) that has been attached to an EC2 instance (which boots from a different EBS volume), and I have mounted the volume (through mount /dev/sdf /data). When I stop and start again the instance, the volume is still attached but no longer mounted, and I have to manually mount it again.

Is there a way to make the volume /dev/sdf automatically mounted to /data upon starting the instance?

Answer 1

Make an entry to /etc/fstab

Entry would be like:

/dev/sdf    /data   ext3    defaults    1 1

This will automatically mount the volume during reboot.

Answer 2

It would seem that the official ec2 documentation now recommends plain old fstab entries with nofail -

/dev/xvdf       /data   ext4    defaults,nofail        0       2

ref - http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-using-volumes.html

Answer 3

I recommend using an /etc/init conf file that do that:

• login with root
• create a new file (not executable) name it like this : mountec2vol.conf
• paste into it this code :

# /etc/init/mountec2vol.conf
#
# description: Mounts the EBS Volume
#
start on net-device-up
exec mount /dev/xvdf1 /myVolume`

• Reboot if you want to test

that's all what you have to do!