How to Recover an Unreachable EC2 Linux Instance

volume

Here is a tutorial that will come handy one day, in the moment of panic – How to Recover an Unreachable Linux Instance. It has plenty of screenshots and shows each step in detail.

TL;DR version:

  1. Start a new instance (or pick one from the existing ones).
  2. Stop the broken instance.
  3. Detach the volume from the broken instance.
  4. Attach the volume to the new/existing instance as additional disk.
  5. Troubleshoot and fix the problem.
  6. Detach the volume from the new/existing instance.
  7. Attach the volume to the broken instance.
  8. Start the new instance.
  9. Get rid of the useless new instance, if you didn’t reuse the existing one for the troubleshooting and fixing process.
  10. ???
  11. PROFIT!

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