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Making an Amazon EBS Volume Available for Use
Inside the instance, the Amazon EBS volume is exposed as a normal block device and can be formatted as any file system and mounted.
After making the Amazon EBS volume available for use, you can take snapshots of it for backup purposes or to use as baselines to launch new volumes.
Linux
This section describes how to make a volume available to the Linux operating system.
![[Caution]](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/docs-common/images/caution.png) | Caution |
|---|---|
This procedure assumes you want to mount an empty volume. If you're mounting a volume that already has
data on it (e.g., a public dataset), don't use |
To create an ext3 file system on the Amazon EBS volume and mount it as /mnt/data-store
Enter the following command.
$yes | mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdhEnter the following command.
$mkdir /mnt/data-storeEnter the following command.
$mount /dev/sdh /mnt/data-store
Any data written to this file system is written to the Amazon EBS volume and is transparent to applications using the device.
![[Note]](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/docs-common/images/note.png) | Note |
|---|---|
To enable the instance to reconnect to an Amazon EBS volume on reboot, add the device to the fstab or create a script that automatically mounts the volume on start-up. |
Windows
This section describes how to make a volume available to the Windows operating system.
| Caution |
|---|---|
If you're mounting a volume that already has data on it (e.g., a public dataset), make sure you don't reformat the volume and delete the existing data. |
To use an Amazon EBS volume
Log in to your instance using Remote Desktop.
On the taskbar, click Start, and then click Run.
Type diskmgmt.msc and click OK. The Disk Management utility opens.
Right-click the Amazon EBS volume, select New Volume, and follow the on-screen prompts.
Note If the New Volume option does not appear, select Format.
Any data written to this file system is written to the Amazon EBS volume and is transparent to applications using the device.
