I am using Red Hat linux9. I want to make a bootable Floppy disk.  How can I do it?
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You can create a boot floppy with the mkbootdisk command.
You could copy your MBR to a floppy with:
# dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1
NB the above will use the kernel on your hard drive to boot and not copy it to the floppy like the mkbootdisk command. You can also do similar by either editing lilo.conf (change boot=/dev/hda to boot=/dev/fd0, then run lilo) or with grub-install /dev/fd0 (depending on whether you use lilo or grub).

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First open a terminal and type: man dd

once you have read that, here is the best discription i can give you for the command:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1

dd - this is the actual command, everything else is an argument for the command.

if= - if stands for "input file". this is the file or device you are going to "read into" the command. Here you are setting it equal to the first hard disk device on your system. /dev is a directory which contains hardware device names. hda is the first hard drive listed in that /dev directory. this will be the drive which is booting and most likly contains your operating system. so "hd" means hard disk and "a" is its order...if you had two hard disks you may see "hda" and "hdb" in that /dev directory.

of= - of stands for "output file" or device. notice you are back in the /dev directory. 3Dave has you calling "fd0". This is the first floppy drive in your system. if you had two floppy drives you may also see "fd1" in the /dev directory. Remeber to put a floppy in the drive before running this command.

bs= - bs stands for "block size". the terms block and sector are interchangable, however block is used more widley in the unix/linux world. Here 3Dave is setting it eqaul to 512 (this means 512 kilobytes - the standard size of a single block on a hard drive).

count= - count is tells the command how many of these blocks to read, then write. the default is all of them. 3Dave has you reading only the very first one, and writing the very first one to the floppy because that is the area on the disk which contains the neccessary information to boot the operating system located on your hard disk. This area with the neccessary data is known as the "MBR" or "Master Boot Record".

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Probably way to much an over kill explanation, but it was fun. In summary you are reading the boot data and writing it to another source (the floppy). This will only boot the current operating system on that computer. it is not a stand alone linux boot disc running off a floppy.

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FYI: "dd" = "duplicate disk" and can also be used for backups, cloning hard drives, creating boot disks from floppy images etc and basically gives you raw read/write access to drives.

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...you can also use it to blank your MBR (eg to get rid of lilo or grub):
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
or if you want to keep your partition table intact:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1

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You will probably find quite a lot of HOWTOs already installed on your PC (usually somewhere under /usr/share/doc/). You can also use apropos and man to find info and manual pages on specific subjects and commands, eg to find out stuff on networking:

$ apropos network
SNIP
ifconfig (8) - configure a network interface
ifport (8) - select the transceiver type
/SNIP

$ man ifconfig
This now displays the manual page for ifconfig, the command used for configuring NICs.

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