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I have a 10GB volume attached to my production EC2 instance (It's only 300MB full). In order to do backups, I created a snapshot of it. Then I created a volume from it, which I tried to attach to another EC2 instance. The volume's status shows "attaching" and it never gets attached. I have tried this 4 times, out of which only once it successfully got attached and I could mount it from the EC2 instance. During that one time, it didn't take more than a minute to get attached. All other times it gets stuck in the "attaching" state. I've waited for 3-4 hours, but no help. Only thing I can do then is 'Force detach'. I've been using web UI all this time and not CLI.

What might be going wrong? How can I debug this problem?

2 Answers 2

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I had a similar problem months ago. Turns out it was a problem on Amazon side. It only got solved after contacting the Amazon folks on the ec2 forum https://forums.aws.amazon.com/forum.jspa?forumID=30

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    Ok. I found the posts you talk about on AWS EC2 forums. Don't know why they didn't show up in google searches. After reading those posts and rebooting the instance, the volume got attached on another attempt.
    – Jayesh
    Nov 26, 2011 at 3:52
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For me the actual problem was one ec2 instance - I had a few that the volume was plugged in and out sometimes. All was fine with the other instaces. Here is what the AWS team said after I opened a ticket:

"Occasionally we do see that the OS locks the Device Mapping and a way around this is either to reboot the OS which is recommended or changing the Device Mapping (ie. /dev/sdf to /dev/sdj )"

Rebooting worked but only for one reboot - then the problem reappeared. I didn't want to restart that ec2 instance every time.

I didn't check mapping it to sdj so I can't tell you if it works

What did work was to dump the faulty instance and create a new one in its place. Everything worked fine after I've done that.

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