AWS EC2: Moving /var to EBS

I'm banging my head against a wall for the last 5 hours or so.

I have a brand new Centos 6 installation with Plesk. Once the machine is booted up I'm trying to move the /var folder to an attached EBS (/dev/xvdj):

#copy original /var to /dev/xvdj
mkdir /mnt/new
mount /dev/xvdj /mnt/new
cd /var
cp -Rax * /mnt/new
cd /
mv var var.old
#mount EBS as new /var
umount /dev/xvdj
mkdir /var
mount /dev/xvdj /var

I know I'm supposed to boot the instance into runlevel 1 (single user) to prevent anything writing and reading from /var. However, this locks me out from the instance which I learned the hard way.

I tried to manually stop mysql, webserver and mail server, but I can't bring these services back up, they just state [FAILED] when I attempt to start. They also don't write anything into /var/log. On a first glance permission of the directories inside /var look alright, symlinks exist too.

Any ideas?