the problem: attempting to mount an amazon EBS volume to an EC2 linux machine results in the following:

this can happen if you did not format your volume… try these instructions
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-using-volumes.html

for your convenience, it is also described here:

Caution: This procedure assumes you want to mount an empty volume. If you’re mounting a volume that already has data on it (e.g., a public dataset), don’t use mkfs before mounting the volume. Otherwise you’ll format the volume and delete the existing data.

Enter the following commands