1) Locate the snapshotId you’d like to use ( snap-1781757e for Wikipedia Extraction (WEX))
2) Create a volume from your AWS console – use the snapshotId here. The volume size must be larger than the snapshot. Also, I’ve found that I need to create the volume in the same zone as the instance I’m going to attach it to.
3) Attach the volume to an instance. Select the volume and then click “attach volume”. Suppose for example you chose “/dev/sdf” as the mount point.
4) ssh to your instance and mount the volume: mount /dev/sdf /vol

There you have it. But we’re not quite done – we still need to import all of this data into MySQL or Postgresql. But that’s another post…

To get apache web server with php/mysql support installed I just ran:
yum install httpd php-mysql
This is every bit as easy as apt-get. Making some really good progess. So, the first time around I terminate the instance and figure I’ll pick up where I’ve left off.
The next time when I come back to the AWS console – my instance isn’t there for me to restart. Now, here’s the thing with the EC2 server instances :

WHEN YOU TERMINATE AN EC2 INSTANCE, IT’S LIKE YOU STUFFED THE CASE WITH TNT AND THREW IT INTO A CAMPFIRE.

That’s right, terminate doesn’t mean power-down. It means obliterate. Anything on the drives is G-O-N-E.  It is no more – it’s an ex-instance.

That was rather eye-opening.  So, back to the drawing board and this time, to be safe, I made sure to pick an AMI with EC2 utilities installed on it already.   I installed my software on the instance and this time even registered the services to startup automatically.
service mysql start
service httpd start
I restarted the instance and tested that it came back up with apache and mysql running – it did.  Good enough – it was time to save this instance as an AMI into one of my S3 buckets.  After a bit of finagling I found the correct couple of incantations.
ec2-bundle-vol –cert publicCert –privatekey privatePem –user awsAccountNumber
The above command will create an imageManifestXml which you’ll use in the following statement:
ec2-upload-bundle –bucket s3BucketName –accessKey awsAccessKey –secretKey awsSecretKey –manifest imageManifestXml

This took maybe ten minutes to run both of the above, but afterwards I had new starting point AMI to use – in theory at least…

I double checked everything by starting another instance ( before shutting down the good one ) with the new AMI and making sure that it passed snuff – which it did. I shut down both instances and retired for the night – all of this to save 10 cents an hour. But more importantly it is to understand the process. No, it’s the money
This virtualization stuff is really powerful – I’ll write some more on mounting Volumes and using existing Snapshots of open-sourced datasets soon.