Stuck with “Recover this instance” disabled in EC2 console? We can help you.

Here, at Bobcares, we assist our customers with several AWS queries as part of our AWS Support Services.

Today, let us discuss how we can do this.

How to resolve “Recover this instance” disabled in EC2 console? 

If CloudWatch determines that an EC2 instance uses instance store volumes, the Recover this instance option is disable.

The recover action is not supported for EC2 instances that use instance store volumes, including those launch with block device mappings for instance store volumes.

CloudWatch reads the metadata associated with each EC2 instance to verify that it doesn’t use instance store volumes before enabling the recover action.

Today, let us see the steps followed by our Support Techs to resolve it.

Find ephemeral instance store volumes in EC2 Linux instances

1. Firstly, connect to your Linux instance.

2. Then, use the following command to retrieve metadata from your instance.

curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/block-device-mapping/

3. Use the output to identify instance store volumes (whose names begin with “ephemeral”) mapped to the instance.

Find ephemeral instance store volumes in EC2 Windows instances

Using a browser:

1. Firstly, connect to your Windows instance.

2. Then, open a browser and connect to:

http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/block-device-mapping/

3. Finally, use the information returned to identify instance store volumes (whose names begin with “ephemeral”) mapped to the instance.

Using Windows PowerShell:

1. Firstly, connect to your Windows instance in PowerShell.

2. Then, run the following command:

PS C:\> Invoke-RestMethod -uri http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/block-device-mapping/

3. Use the output to identify instance store volumes (whose names begin with “ephemeral”) mapped to the instance.

Find ephemeral instance store volumes in AMIs for EC2 instances

Review the block device mappings for the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for your EC2 instance.

Check for block device instance store volumes whose “Block Devices” field includes “=ephemeral#”, where “#” is an integer from 0-23.

Block device mapping can occur even if the instance type doesn’t officially support instance store volumes.

This action can occur when you use one of the following to launch an EC2 instance (Windows or Linux):

• The AWS CLI
• An SDK
• A service such as AWS CloudFormation

When you use the Amazon EC2 console to launch an instance type that doesn’t support instance store volumes, Amazon EC2 ignores modified block device mappings.

You can enumerate the EBS volumes in an AMI’s block device mapping using the Amazon EC2 console or the AWS CLI.

For example, the following describe-images command returns the BlockDeviceMapping for the AMI:

aws ec2 describe-images –image-ids ami-xxxxxxxx

Remove or override any references to instance store volumes in the AMI

After you’ve confirmed that your EC2 instance uses instance store volumes, you must remove or override any references to instance store volumes in the AMI.

Then, you must relaunch the instance because instance store volumes can’t be added or removed from an existing EC2 instance.

Use one of the following methods to remove or override references to instance store volumes:

• Remove references to instance store volumes from the AMI. Then, relaunch the instance.
• Launch the EC2 instance from the Amazon EC2 console to override the AMI for instance types that don’t support instance volume stores.
• Launch the EC2 instance from the AWS CLI, and then manually override each device in the AMI that references an instance store volume.
• For an EC2 instance launched by CloudFormation, create a CloudFormation template to override mapping of any devices to instance store volumes.
• For an EC2 instance launched by an SDK, check the relevant SDK documentation for how to override mapping devices to instance store volumes.

[Need help with EC2? We’d be happy to assist you]

Conclusion

In short, we saw how our Support Techs “Recover this instance” disabled in EC2 console.