Can I change the root EBS device of my amazon EC2 instance?

I don't have enough rep to add a comment to the selected answer, but I do want to point out that for me, /dev/sda1 did not work (did not attach as root), but using /dev/xvda worked (attached as root). The instance is one of the newer t2.micro ones using HVM.


Yep, it's dead easy:

  1. Stop the instance.
  2. Detach the root EBS volume.
  3. Attach the alternate EBS volume as the root: /dev/sda1
  4. Start the instance.

This presupposes that your alternate EBS volume is bootable, of course - it has to contain the bootable OS image.