The Network Administrator

As we now have instances which can be booted from EBS (hurray for that), you’re root is also increased to 30gb. But sometimes this still isn’t enough. Here is how you can increase your root partition drive using the AWS Console.

1. login to  your AWS Console
2. Go to [Instances], right click your instance and select [create image (EBS AMI)]
   This will make a backup (just in case)
3. Your instance will reboot, and come up again when the image is created. After that stop your instance (do not terminate it )
4. Next is to go to [Volumes], you will see a 30Gib volume somewhere which is attached as /dev/sda1 to your instance 

   Right click it and select [Create Snapshot from this volume].

5. Next, go to [Snapshots]. Right click the snapshot that you created in the previous step and select [Create Volume from Snapshot], you can then specify how big this volume has to become (for example 50 Gib).
6. After the volume is created go back to volumes again. You will see a volume which is as large as you specified in the previous step. The status of this volume is “available”.
   Now select the volume which is currently attached to your instance. It is the one you located in step 4. Right click it and and select [Detach Volume], it will then become available.
7. Now select your newly created volume, right click it and select [Attach Volume]. Select your instance (which will have a status of “stopped”). In the textbox “Device” type: /dev/sda1. Now click [Attach]
8. Fire up your instance and log in.
9. Open up computer management and select [Disk Management] (underneath the option [storage]). You will see that your root partition has some more space behind it.
10. Right click your root partition and select [Extend Volume], walk through the wizard. Eventually your root partition will be extended.