Note: I asked this question on the EC2 forums too but haven't received any love there. Hopefully the ServerFault community will be more awesome.

The new AWS Sydney region opening up is something that we've been waiting for for a long time but I'm having a lot of trouble migrating our instances over from N. California.

I managed to migrate 1 instance over using CloudyScripts to move a snapshot and then firing up a new instance in the Sydney region. This was a very new instance so both the source and destination were running on a Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server and I had no issues there.

However, the rest of our instances are all Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and with these, I'm having a lot of problems.

I've tried following:

1- following the AWS whitepaper on moving instances which was given to us at the recent Customer Appreciation Day in Sydney where the new region was launched.

The problem with this approach was with the last step (Step 19) here you register the image: ec2-register -s snap-0f62ec3f -n "Wombat" -d "migrated Wombat" --region ap-southeast-2 -a x86_64 --kernel aki-937e2ed6 --block-device-mapping "/dev/sdk=ephemeral0"

I keep getting this error: Client.InvalidAMIID.NotFound: The AMI ID 'ami-937e2ed6' does not exist which I think is due to the kernel_id not existing in the Sydney region?

2- Using CloudyScripts to move a snapshot and then creating a new volume and attaching to a new instance in Sydney

This results in the instance just hanging on boot and failing the status checks. I can't SSH in or look at the server log

I suspect that my issue is with finding the right kernel_id for the volume in the new region. However I can't seem to work out how to go about finding this kernel_id, the ones I've tried (from the original instance) don't result in the Client.InvalidAMIID.NotFound: The AMI ID 'ami-937e2ed6' error and any other kernel_id just won't boot.

I've tried both 12.04 and 10.04 versions of Ubuntu. Nothing seems to work, I've been banging my head against a wall for a while now, please help!

New (broken) instance i-a1acda9b ami-9b8611a1 aki-31990e0b

Source instance i-08a6664e ami-b37e2ef6 aki-937e2ed6

p.s. I also tried following this guide on updating my Ubuntu LTS version to 12.04 before doing the migration but it didn't seem to work either, still getting stuck on updating the kernel_id http://ubuntu-smoser.blogspot.com.au/2010/04/upgrading-ebs-instance.html