I'm facing a frustrating issue with my EC2 instance that has two volumes: one for the OS and web servers (root volume) and a larger secondary storage with an st1 volume for data that doesn't require high throughput. Sometimes, when I start the instance, I get the error `/dev/nvme1n1: Can't open blockdev`. I've noticed that shutting down the instance completely and starting it back up usually fixes the problem, but just rebooting doesn't help. I think this might be related to AWS taking too long to spin up the HDD during startup, which seems to be a new problem that's cropped up in the last couple of months. I'm hoping to find a solution that won't involve switching to an SSD. Any thoughts? Thanks!
1 Answer
It sounds like your issue could be a race condition between the nvme driver loading and when your volume is trying to mount during boot. What instance type are you using exactly? Also, which Linux distribution? It might help to know how you're mounting the volume in your configuration too.
I'm using a T5n large instance with Ubuntu 25. I mount the volume through the EC2 GUI for attaching/detaching volumes. I haven't had any previous issues with the mounting process.