Switch Amazon EC2 instance from small to large, reusing block device

Question

I created a small Amazon EC2 instance like this:

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

That created a fixed disk for the instance in Amazon's Elastic Block Store. Now I find I would like to upgrade to a large instance of EC2... but I would like to continue using the fixed disk I created for the small instance.

How do I switch it over? (For the record, that AMI is for the US West Ubuntu image.)

Answer 1

Coincidentally, Eric Hammond has just written an article about this exact topic. I think it should answer your question perfectly.