A while back, I deleted all volumes attached to my EC2 instance because I thought they were incurring costs. Now that I need to use my EC2 instance again I recreated a volume and attached it to the instance. However, every time I start instance it stops automatically with the following reason: Client.InstanceInitiatedShutdown: Instance initiated shutdown
Am I correct in assuming that this is because the volume being attached is virgin and so the instance has no idea how and with what to boot itself? Is there a way to recover just a simple volume that would be associated with the standard Linux AMI I used? Or do I have to delete this instance, create a new one and make sure I store a snapshot of the root volume before deleting it next time?
Unless you have some data on that volume that you've revived from a snapshot - just create a virgin instance. If there's data - anyway, create a virgin instance with root volume that will die together with the instance. Use EBS to store data that needs to be persisted over the instance lifetime.