Attach volume to windows EC2 instance

In this tutorial we will learn to attach extra volume to EC2 windows instance. So, lets create a windows instance first and then create a new volume and attach it with newly created instance.

Step-1: Create a Windows instance

Go to EC2 console, Create instance by using windows AMI and using a new Key pair. To get the password, Click on Actions => Connect => RDP Client

a) Download the Remote Desktop File

b) Click on Get Password by browsing keypair

c) Click on Decrypt Password and note the Password displayed

d) Open the Remote Desktop File (downloaded in step-a) or use mstsc to log-in to Windows instance

e) Login wih Username Administrator and Password as per step-c

f) Go to EC2 Windows file explorer, and you should be able to see C:\ drive of size 30 GB

Now, lets say you want attach additional disk D:\ drive of 20 GB, to do that follow the following steps

Step-2: Create and attach new volume to Windows EC2

a) Note the availability zone of your EC2 instance. In our case it is us-east-1e

b) Go to EC2 console, in the left menu go to Volumes under Elastic Block Store

c) Click on ‘Create Volume’ , and use following configurations

Volume Type: Magnetic (Standard) as it is the most cost effective volume type.

Size: 20 GB

Availability Zone: us-east-1e (same as of instance)

And click on Create Volume. At this stage, state is ‘Available’ while other volumes are ‘in-use’

d) Select and Attach this volume to the Windows instance

Actions => Attach Volume => choose instance => Attach

It will change the state to ‘in-use’

e) Go to EC2 instance and check if D:\ drive is available. However, it is still not visible there. Go to ‘Server Manager’

Click on File and Storage devices, Go to ‘Disks’ and you will notice this newly created 20 GB Volume is showing ‘offline’

Click on that, then right-click => Bring online => yes

Now, in the lower pane, in the ‘Volumes’ section click on ‘To create a volume, Start a new volume wizard’

select the disk, and Next, Choose the drive letter (D), Next, File System ‘NTFS’, Create

Co Back to Windows explorer, and now you should be able to see D;\ drive attached

Create some file and save to d:\, New drive is now available for use.

Step -3: Cleanup resources

Delete the Volume and Terminate the instance. if it was for trial purpose.

PS: Comment if it improvements and Applaud if useful.