How to Reduce the Size of Amazon EBS Volume?

[dFrank]

There is no documentation on this on Amazon site.

I have a small Windows instance, and I launched and configured an instance with 100GB EBS volume. Now I realized that I would have to pay $10 per month for this extravagance. I would like to reduce the size of my EBS volume down to 40GB.

I do not want to start all over and reconfigure everything and reinstall everything into a new instance.

Random articles of kindness I could find are about other-than-Windows instances.

So far I tried this scenario:

– Create an exact copy of my EBS volume (100GB);

– Create a new 40 GB EBS volume;

– Attach these volumes to my current instance;

– Copy everything from 100GB to 40GB drive using ROBOCOPY;

– Stop the instance and detach all volumes;

– Attach new 40GB volume as a root device /dev/sda1

– Restart the instance.

This being a perfectly nice plan, but instance didn’t pass the second status validation check, and I had to return to my original 100GB volume.

Any ideas on what I am doing wrong?

[newSer]

You are right. This is one tough problem.

Here are the steps that I tried take to reduce my Windows EBS volume.

I hope they will save time and effort in further experimenting:

-01- Direct Copy

You create an identical large volume, you create an empty volume of a desired (smaller) size, you attach both volumes to PROD and copy everything from a large volume to a small.

Result: new instance will not pass second status check.

-02- In-place Restore

You backup your PROD into a separate drive and try to restore this content directly into a running Windows instance

Result: it does restore, but all the locked files (registry) and skipped.

-03- Volume Restore

You backup your PROD into a separate drive and restore content into a smaller volume

Result: new instance will not pass second status check.

-04- Files and Folders Restore

The same as previous, but you restore using Files and Folders option

Result: new instance will not pass second status check.

The only option left on the table is to launch a new instance and reinstall and reconfigure all the components one by one. What a pain!

[Chuck Straughn]

You can totally shrink an Amazon EBS Windows volume. It’s involved but I’ve created a very detailed, tested, and verified technical guide. You are welcome to use it, it’s on my Evernote account: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s2/sh/2801b360-994c-4b6e-8aab-3743f9662fe9/7403918691bb67b82fc20310a71bab0a

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