I am a Linux newbie. Just installed Redhat 9.0 and dual boot with Windows 2000. My goal is to play and learn but I made the mistake of playing too much with root login authority and now I have accidentally overwritten the device file for my floppy /dev/fd0. I'm looking for help to recover that device file. Thanks for any suggestions! I will play with a non-root login from now on!

it sholdn't be possible to overwrite it, as you should be running on devfs, which means that the file entires you have in /dev/ are not actually real files at all, and will be created each time you boot based on /etc/devfsd.conf or a similar configuration file.

if you are not running it then try "mknod /dev/fd0 b 2 0". a reboot should be the first route though

Thanks, but rebooting was already attempted with no change. I tried the mknod /dev/fd0 b 2 0 and the result was file already exists so I deleted it and retried the command at which point it recreated it. Attempting the command fdformat /dev/fd0 after that resulted in /dev/fd0:No such device or address. Here's a little overview of how I ended up with this situation. I was attempting to copy a file to diskette after formatting the diskette. I was using the mv command(wrong choice) in the attempt to get the file to diskette. It looked like "mv /dump /dev/fd0". I responded with yes when it asked if I wanted to overwrite this so I wiped out whatever used to be in /dev/fd0. Immediately after that big mistake, fdformat /dev/fd0 resulted in "/dev/fd0:not a block device". So I need to find a way to restore whatever used to reside in /dev/fd0.