Please help! Amazon EC2 EBS instance has failed. Need to retrieve files

Question

My instance has been running smoothly for about 2 weeks, but yesterday I think I managed to break something during development of my application (although I just played around with mysql)..

Today when I tried access the server it was very slow, so I checked the instance monitoring log which, to my surprise, showed the CPU maxed out 100% the last 24 hours.

So I restarted the instance, was able to login again with SSH. But it was still very slow, so I restarted it again. And since then I've kept getting timeout errors when I try to access with SSH.

I've also tried to create an ami of my instance and launching a new one based on that ami, but same connection problem occurs.

I really need to access the files on the server. Is it possible to download the AMI and mount it locally? Or in any way access the files if I can't SSH in to the server?

Answer 1

The process I describe in this article could be used to get files off of an EBS boot instance that is having troubles:

Fixing Files on the Root EBS Volume of an EC2 Instance
http://alestic.com/2011/02/ec2-fix-ebs-root

If you're running an instance-store instance, you're going to have more difficulty.

Answer 2

You should contact amazon with you AMI number. They'll be able to tell you what can be done. The forums are usually quite responsive ( https://aws.amazon.com/support ) with Amazon staff members.

Also, try the ec2 mailing lists (like ec2ubuntu)

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Note There have 'recently' been elevated error rates with VPNs in N. Virginia region (see http://status.aws.amazon.com/ or subscribe to their RSS )