Can a new EC2 instance attach to EBS volumes that are currently attached to another EC2 instance that's failed in reachability check?

Question

I have an EC2 small instance, which has two EBS volumes attached and has EBS as root device. Now the EC2 instance is not reachable for some reason (AWS engineers are looking into it). In the mean while, we are thinking about launch another EC2 instance and attach it to the two EBS volumes. What's the best practice for that purpose? Do I need to take snapshot of the volumes before re-attach to the new EC2 instance? Can we attach to them without destroying the existing data on the volumes?

Answer 1

You do not need to take a snapshot in order to attach the volume to a new instance. You can simply detach the volumes and re-attach them to a new instance.
Your data will not be destroyed in this process.
Hope it helps.