Make an Amazon EBS volume available for use on Windows

After you attach an Amazon EBS volume to your instance that runs on Xen hypervisor, it is exposed as a block device, and appears as a removable disk in Windows. You can format the volume with any file system and then mount it. After you make the EBS volume available for use, you can access it in the same ways that you access any other volume. Any data written to this file system is written to the EBS volume and is transparent to applications using the device.

On Nitro instances, the Amazon EBS volume is exposed as a block device when the NVM Express (NVMe) controller scans the PCI bus. The disk does not appear as removable. Unlike Xen-based instances, there is only one NVMe controller per EBS volume on Nitro instances.

You can take snapshots of your EBS volume for backup purposes or to use as a baseline when you create another volume. For more information, see Amazon EBS snapshots.

If the EBS volume you are preparing for use is greater than 2 TiB, you must use a GPT partitioning scheme to access the entire volume. For more information, see Constraints on the size and configuration of an EBS volume.

You can get directions for volumes on a Linux instance from Make a volume available for use on Linux in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances.

PowerShell

To make all EBS volumes with raw partitions available to use with Windows PowerShell

Log in to your Windows instance using Remote Desktop. For more information, see Connect to your Windows instance.
On the taskbar, open the Start menu, and choose Windows PowerShell.
Use the provided series of Windows PowerShell commands within the opened PowerShell prompt. The script performs the following actions by default:
1. Stops the ShellHWDetection service.
2. Enumerates disks where the partition style is raw.
3. Creates a new partition that spans the maximum size the disk and partition type will support.
4. Assigns an available drive letter.
5. Formats the file system as NTFS with the specified file system label.
6. Starts the ShellHWDetection service again.
```
Stop-Service -Name ShellHWDetection
Get-Disk | Where PartitionStyle -eq 'raw' | Initialize-Disk -PartitionStyle MBR -PassThru | New-Partition -AssignDriveLetter -UseMaximumSize | Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS -NewFileSystemLabel "Volume Label" -Confirm:$false
Start-Service -Name ShellHWDetection
```

DiskPart command line tool

To make an EBS volume available to use with the DiskPart command line tool

Log in to your Windows instance using Remote Desktop. For more information, see Connect to your Windows instance.
Determine the disk number that you want to make available:
1. Open the Start menu, and select Windows PowerShell.
2. Use the Get-Disk Cmdlet to retrieve a list of available disks.
3. In the command output, note the Number corresponding to the disk that you're making available.
Create a script file to execute DiskPart commands:
1. Open the Start menu, and select File Explorer.
2. Navigate to a directory, such as C:\, to store the script file.
3. Choose or right-click an empty space within the folder to open the dialog box, position the cursor over New to access the context menu, and then choose Text Document.
4. Name the text file diskpart.txt.
Add the following commands to the script file. You may need to modify the disk number, partition type, volume label, and drive letter. The script performs the following actions by default:
1. Selects disk 1 for modification.
2. Configures the volume to use the master boot record (MBR) partition structure.
3. Formats the volume as an NTFS volume.
4. Sets the volume label.
5. Assigns the volume a drive letter.
Warning
If you're mounting a volume that already has data on it, do not reformat the volume or you will delete the existing data.
```
select disk 1 
attributes disk clear readonly 
online disk noerr
convert mbr 
create partition primary 
format quick fs=ntfs label="volume_label" 
assign letter="drive_letter"
```
For more information, see DiskPart Syntax and Parameters.
Open a command prompt, navigate to the folder in which the script is located, and run the following command to make a volume available for use on the specified disk:
```
C:\> diskpart /s diskpart.txt
```

Disk Management utility

To make an EBS volume available to use with the Disk Management utility

Log in to your Windows instance using Remote Desktop. For more information, see Connect to your Windows instance.
Start the Disk Management utility. On the taskbar, open the context (right-click) menu for the Windows logo, and choose Disk Management.

Note
In Windows Server 2008, choose Start, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management.
Bring the volume online. In the lower pane, open the context (right-click) menu for the left panel for the disk for the EBS volume. Choose Online.
(Conditional) If the disk is not initialized, you must initialize it before you can use it. If the disk is already initialized, skip this step.

Warning
If you're mounting a volume that already has data on it (for example, a public data set, or a volume that you created from a snapshot), do not reformat the volume or you will delete the existing data.

If the disk is not initialized, initialize it as follows:
1. Open the context (right-click) menu for the left panel for the disk, and choose Initialize Disk.
2. In the Initialize Disk dialog box, select a partition style, and choose OK.
Open the context (right-click) menu for the right panel for the disk, and choose New Simple Volume.
In the New Simple Volume Wizard, choose Next.
If you want to change the default maximum value, specify the Simple volume size in MB, and then choose Next.
Specify a preferred drive letter, if necessary, within the Assign the following drive letter dropdown, and then choose Next.
Specify a Volume Label and adjust the default settings as necessary, and then choose Next.
Review your settings, and then choose Finish to apply the modifications and close the New Simple Volume wizard.