Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
CLI Reference (API Version 2011-12-15)
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ec2-attach-volume

Description

Attaches an Amazon EBS volume to a running instance and exposes it as the specified device.

[Note]Note

Windows instances currently support devices xvda through xvdp. Device xvda is assigned to drive C:\, and, depending on the instance type, devices xvdb through xvde might be reserved by the ephemeral stores. Any device that is not reserved can be attached to an Amazon EBS volume.

The short version of this command is ec2attvol.

Syntax

ec2-attach-volume volume_id --instance instance_id --device device

Options

NameDescriptionRequired

volume_id

The ID of the Amazon EBS volume. The volume and instance must be within the same Availability Zone and the instance must be running.

Type: String

Default: None

Example: vol-4d826724

Yes

-i, --instance instance_id

The ID of the instance to which the volume attaches. The volume and instance must be within the same Availability Zone and the instance must be running.

Type: String

Default: None

Example: -i i-6058a509

Yes

-d, --device device

Specifies how the device is exposed to the instance.

Type: String

Default: None

Example: -d /dev/sdf (for Linux/UNIX) or -d xvdf (for Windows)

Yes

Common Options

OptionDescription

--region REGION

Overrides the Region specified in the EC2_URL environment variable and the URL specified by the -U option.

Default: The EC2_URL environment variable, or us-east-1 if the environment variable is not set.

Example: --region eu-west-1

-U, --url URL

URL is the uniform resource locator of the Amazon EC2 web service entry point.

Default: The EC2_URL environment variable, or https://ec2.amazonaws.com if the environment variable is not set.

Example: -U https://ec2.amazonaws.com

-K, --private-key EC2-PRIVATE-KEY

The private key to use when constructing requests to Amazon EC2.

Default: The value of the EC2_PRIVATE_KEY environment variable.

Example: -K pk-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBEXAMPLE.pem

-C, --cert EC2-CERT

The X.509 certificate to use when constructing requests to Amazon EC2.

Default: The value of the EC2_CERT environment variable.

Example: -C cert-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBEXAMPLE.pem

--connection-timeout TIMEOUT

Specifies a connection timeout (in seconds).

Example: --connection-timeout 30

--request-timeout TIMEOUT

Specifies a request timeout (in seconds).

Example: --request-timeout 45

-v, --verbose

Displays verbose output by showing the SOAP request and response on the command line. This is particularly useful if you are building tools to talk directly to our SOAP API.

-H, --headers

Displays column headers in the output.

--show-empty-fields

Shows empty columns as (nil).

--hide-tags

Do not display tags for tagged resources.

--debug

Prints internal debugging information. This is useful to assist us when troubleshooting problems.

-?, --help, -h

Displays Help.

-

If - is specified as an argument to one of the parameters, a list of arguments is read from standard input. This is useful for piping the output of one command into the input of another.

Example: ec2-describe-instances | grep stopped | cut -f 2 | ec2-start-instances -

Output

The command returns a table that contains the following information:

  • ATTACHMENT identifier

  • ID of the volume

  • ID of the instance

  • The device as it is exposed to the instance

  • Attachment state (e.g., attaching, attached, detached, detaching, error)

  • Time stamp when attachment initiated

Amazon EC2 command line tools display errors on stderr.

Examples

Example Request

This example attaches volume vol-4d826724 to instance i-6058a509 and exposes it as /dev/sdh. For information on standard storage locations, go to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

PROMPT> ec2-attach-volume vol-4d826724 -i i-6058a509 -d /dev/sdh
ATTACHMENT vol-4d826724 i-6058a509 /dev/sdh attaching
							2008-02-14T00:15:00+0000