Today I Learned (TIL) about an interesting issue that can occur when mounting Amazon EBS volumes created from snapshots. The problem arises from UUID conflicts which can prevent the mounting process.
When you create an EBS volume from a snapshot, the new volume inherits the UUID of the original filesystem. If the original volume is still mounted on the same instance, this can cause a UUID conflict when you try to mount the new volume.
Let’s say you’re trying to mount a volume with XFS filesystem:
sudo mount -t xfs /dev/nvme2n1 /backup-check
And you encounter an error like this:
mount: /backup-check: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/nvme2n1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.
The issue might be due to a UUID conflict. To resolve this, you can use the -o nouuid option when mounting the volume:
sudo mount -t xfs -o nouuid /dev/nvme2n1 /backup-check
The -o nouuid option tells the mount command to ignore the UUID of the filesystem. This allows the volume to be mounted even if another volume with the same UUID is already mounted.
🔗Check UUID
You can check the UUID of a filesystem using the blkid command:
sudo blkid /dev/nvme2n1
This command will output something like this:
/dev/nvme2n1: UUID="1234abcd-12ab-34cd-56ef-123456abcdef" TYPE="xfs"
You can compare the UUIDs of your volumes to see if there’s a conflict.