Use of Root (su)

[karina.popkova at verizon.net (karina.popkova at verizon.net)]

Hello

I have a school assignment that includes 
mounting a floppy on RHAT 9.0, and making a ext2 fs.

and I used the command:

mount -t /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy 
mke2fs /dev/fd0 1440

I get an error that says 
you must be root.

I do not have root priviledges
on the machine thus can not accomplish what I need to do.

Is the need to go to root, typical,
to mount a filesystem, or to make 
a ext2fs ???

thanks

-Karina