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;"
I don't understand your confusion about specifying the snapshot ID via the web interface; the instructions don't say "type in" the ID, it merely says "Configure the following settings" -- and yes, the pulldown can contain a lot of entries.
For the certificate on the command line, it's not your SSH key it wants, it's your AWS certificate, which you can find out all about at http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSSecurityCredentials/1.0/AboutAWSCredentials.html#X509Credentials
In order to get past this security error, I have created a X.509 certificate on my AWS account. I copied the new certificate to my server and passed the command line argument my new certificate, still no luck. Finally, I have uploaded the private key which was generated at the same time as creating the X.509 cert. I passed this on to the command line using the --private-key switch, and I am no longer getting a security error. But another error, this one complaining about the snapshot id that I am using.