Linux – Recover data from EC2 instance storage

So last week, an instance on EC2 stopped responding, I still don't know exactly why because I can no longer SSH in, I suspect the /tmp/ directory which was mounted to another drive is no longer accessible for some unknown reason.

I have some very important files I need to get off this server…

I am still able to pull the logs in the AWS console, here are some very relevant lines (I am still able to reboot the server):

        Welcome to  CentOS release 5.4 (Final)
        Press 'I' to enter interactive startup.
Cannot access the Hardware Clock via any known method.
Use the --debug option to see the details of our search for an access method.
Setting clock : Thu Dec 29 13:52:43 EST 2011 [  OK  ]

Starting udev: [  OK  ]

Setting hostname localhost.localdomain:  [  OK  ]

No devices found
Setting up Logical Volume Management: File descriptor 7 (/sys/kernel/hotplug) leaked on lvm.static invocation. Parent PID 232: /bin/bash
[  OK  ]

Checking filesystems
Checking all file systems.
[/sbin/fsck.ext3 (1) -- /] fsck.ext3 -a /dev/sda1 
/dev/sda1: clean, 202786/1310720 files, 1428718/2621440 blocks
[  OK  ]

Remounting root filesystem in read-write mode:  [  OK  ]

Mounting local filesystems:  [  OK  ]

Enabling local filesystem quotas:  [  OK  ]

chown: cannot access `/tmp/.ICE-unix': No such file or directory
Enabling /etc/fstab swaps:  [  OK  ]

INIT: Entering runlevel: 4

Entering non-interactive startup
Starting background readahead: [  OK  ]

Bringing up loopback interface:  [  OK  ]

Bringing up interface eth0:  
Determining IP information for eth0...mktemp: cannot create temp file /tmp/wnt890: No such file or directory
/sbin/dhclient-script: line 57: $rscf: ambiguous redirect
/sbin/dhclient-script: line 62: $rscf: ambiguous redirect
/sbin/dhclient-script: line 69: $rscf: ambiguous redirect
 done.
[  OK  ]

Starting getsshkey:  /etc/rc4.d/S11getsshkey: line 12: /tmp/my-key: No such file or directory
getting ssh-key...
/etc/rc4.d/S11getsshkey: line 17: /tmp/my-key: No such file or directory
getting ssh-key...

I'm certain its not a firewall issue. Here is the output of nmap

[root@ip-xxxxxxxxx ~]# nmap -sS -P0 xxxxxxxxxxx

Starting Nmap 4.11 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2011-12-29 16:32 EST
Interesting ports on xxxxxx (xxxxxxxxx):
Not shown: 1675 filtered ports
PORT     STATE  SERVICE
22/tcp   closed ssh
25/tcp   closed smtp
80/tcp   closed http
443/tcp  closed https
8000/tcp closed http-alt