I am trying to use a Public Dataset with the snapshot id of snap-­e1608d88. I am looking at these instructions, but they do not seem to help.

The first suggestion there says I should click on Volumes and create a new volume, set it's size and availability zone, as well as specifying the snapshot id. The problem is, snapshot id is a dropdown, not a text field, and there are over 100 options in the dropdown.

Next I installed the ec2 command line tools and tried to run the ec2-create-volume command. For my first attempt I tried ec2-create-volume --snapshot snap-­e1608d88 --availability-zone us-east-1 but that gave output indicating I need to provide a certificate with the --cert switch. Which certficate exactly? I tried my SSH cert at ~/.ssh/id_rsa. No dice. I got the following Java error: "org.codehaus.xfire.fault.XFireFault: General security error;"