Attaching and mounting existing EBS volume to EC2 instance filesystem issue

I had some unknown issue with my old EC2 instance so that I can't ssh into it anymore. Therefore I'm attempting to create a new EBS volume from a snapshot of the old volume and mount it into the new instance. Here is exactly what I did: 1. Created a new volume from snapshot of the old one. 2. Created a new EC2 instance and attached the volume to it as `/dev/xvdf` (or `/dev/sdf`) 3. SSHed into the instance and attempted to mount the old volume with: `$ sudo mkdir -m 000 /vol $ sudo mount /dev/xvdf /vol` And the output was: mount: block device /dev/xvdf is write-protected, mounting read-only mount: you must specify the filesystem type I know I should specify the filesytem as `ext4` but the volume contains a lot of important data, so I cannot afford to format it with `$ sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/xvdf`. If I try `sudo mount /dev/xvdf /vol -t ext4` (no formatting) I get: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/xvdf, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so And `dmesg | tail` gives me: [ 1433.217915] EXT4-fs (xvdf): VFS: Can't find ext4 filesystem [ 1433.222107] FAT-fs (xvdf): bogus number of reserved sectors [ 1433.226127] FAT-fs (xvdf): Can't find a valid FAT filesystem [ 1433.260752] EXT4-fs (xvdf): VFS: Can't find ext4 filesystem [ 1433.265563] EXT4-fs (xvdf): VFS: Can't find ext4 filesystem [ 1433.270477] EXT4-fs (xvdf): VFS: Can't find ext4 filesystem [ 1433.274549] FAT-fs (xvdf): bogus number of reserved sectors [ 1433.277632] FAT-fs (xvdf): Can't find a valid FAT filesystem [ 1433.306549] ISOFS: Unable to identify CD-ROM format. [ 2373.694570] EXT4-fs (xvdf): VFS: Can't find ext4 filesystem By the way, the 'mounting read-only' message also worries me but I haven't look into it yet since I can't mount the volume at all.