Why isn't my attached EBS volume showing in my OS or in Disk Management on my EC2 Windows instance?

Resolution

1.    Connect to your Windows instance using Remote Desktop.

2.    Open the Disk Management menu, and then choose Action, Rescan Disks. Verify that the attached volume appears.

3.    If the volume doesn't appear in Disk Management, then the instance might have outdated storage drivers (AWS PV or AWS NVMe). EC2 Xen instances, such as t2 instances, use AWS PV drivers as storage drivers. AWS NVMe drivers are needed for storage on instances built on the Nitro system, such as m5 instances.

Note: For instance type specifications, see Amazon EC2 instance types.

To verify the driver versions installed on your EC2 Windows instance, run the following command in PowerShell:

Get-WmiObject Win32_PnpSignedDriver | Select-Object DeviceName, DriverVersion, InfName | Where-Object {$_.DeviceName -like "*AWS*" -OR $_.DeviceName -like "*Amazon*"}

The preceding command returns the current driver used by the instance. The command returns the ENA and NVMe driver versions for Nitro-based instances. The command returns the PV driver package version for Xen-based systems.

Verify that the installed driver versions are the latest version. For Xen-based instance types, verify the version of the AWS PV Storage Host Adapter. For Nitro-based instance types, verify the driver version of the AWS NVMe Elastic Block Storage Adapter. For more information, see AWS PV driver package history or AWS NVMe driver version history.

Note: It's a best practice to create a backup of your instance before upgrading the drivers.

4.    If the drivers aren't the latest version, see Upgrade PV drivers or AWS NVMe drivers for Windows instances.

Related information

How do I attach a new EBS volume to a running Amazon EC2 Windows instance?