Small to large Amazon EC2 instance switch, block device reuse

Question

I created a small instance of Amazon EC2 as follows:

ec2-run-instances --group default --block-device-mapping "/dev/sda1=:16:off" \
  --instance-initiated-shutdown-behavior stop ami-cb97c68e

This created a fixed drive for the instance in the Amazon Elastic Block Store. Now I find that I want to switch to a large instance of EC2 ... but I would like to continue to use a fixed drive created for a small instance.

How do i switch it? (For reference, that is AMI for the US West Ubuntu image.)

Answer 1

By the way, Eric Hammond just wrote an article about this exact topic. I think he should answer your question perfectly.