Q:

Mounting an attached ebs volume in EC2

I've created an EC2 instance, created an EBS volume, attached it to the running instance, and successfully ssh'ed into my instance.
The drive is attached as /dev/sdf
Next, I tried mounting the drive by running:
mkdir /testName
mount -t ext3 /dev/sdf /testName

But then I get the error message:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdf,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

What am I doing wrong?
Thanks.

A:

Here's a complete set of commands that you should run once you've attached the EBS volume to your EC2 instance:
mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdf   # (NOTE - if you created your EBS volume from a snapshot of another volume and want to preserve its data, skip this step)
echo "/dev/sdf  /testName  ext3     noatime  0 0" >> /etc/fstab
mkdir /testName
mount /testName
df -h                   # (you should now see a new /testName file system mounted on the EBS volume)

A:

I had the same problem while mounting an EBS volume that I had taken a snapshot of.  The gotcha was that when I attached the volume (e.g., /dev/sdf), it was actually partitioned so (/dev/sdf1) was also created.  I was able to mount /dev/sdf1 with no problem.

A:

Have you created the filesystem yet?
mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdf

