CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-servicesubuntuamazon-ec2ubuntu-16.04
Corsterix
Corsterix

Reputation: 43

How can I make an EBS volume with a raw image bootable?

I am trying to create an AMI from the raw images here:

http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/xenial/release/ubuntu-16.04-server-cloudimg-amd64.tar.gz

Here are the steps I'm taking:

  1. Log into existing Ubuntu instance
  2. Create, attach and mount the EBS volume
  3. Download and extract image from cloud-images.ubuntu.com

4. dd extracted image to attached volume /dev/xvdf 

time sudo dd if=cloudimg-amd64.img of=/dev/xvdf conv=sync,noerror bs=1M
  1. Detach volume, snapshot volume, create ami from snapshot

When I try to launch the AMI it fails with hard disk not bootable.

In addition to the above also tried using ec2-import-instance

  ec2-import-instance --architecture x86_64 --platform Linux --bucket mybucket --volume-size 5 --availability-zone us-east-1d -O ID-REMOVED -W ID-REMOVED -o ID-REMOVED -w ID-REMOVED --instance-type t2.micro --format raw xenial.img  --subnet subnet-12345678

but it appears --format raw actually doeesn't mean what it says, it doesn't create a bootable AMI and fails with 

 Client.Unsupported: No valid MBR found. Please verify your image.

So how can I manually make a volume bootable (or create an AMI) from a raw image obtained from cloud-images.ubuntu.com?

Note: I need to be able to do this from the RAW EC2 images at cloud-images.ubuntu.com, copying existing AMI's is not an option.

I also tried aws ec2 import-image method, that doesn't work either for any format.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1662

Answers (1)

Corsterix
Corsterix

Reputation: 43

I solved this by using the Amazon CLI, specifically this command:

 aws ec2 import-snapshot

Then I created a volume with a bootable partition and copied the snapshot to it.

RAW images must be imported as snapshots.

Upvotes: 2

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