DOSBOX is an emulator that runs on top of (in this instance) Linux. Therefore it's the Linux USB stack that's in play here - the emulated DOS system doesn't know anything about USB.
Most emulators like this can patch through host devices - either as a directory of files (allowing DOS to read, for example, ext4 filesystems that it can't natively) or as a raw block device (for example, for images of DOS floppies).
Something is going wrong in the way that DOSBOX is detecting the host's filesystems, which might be originally derived from USB, but USB is not something DOS has anything to do with.
From what it says on the DOSBOX website, I'd expect to MOUNT USB memory devices after plugging them in: the manual says thats how you assign a drive letter to any storage you want DOSBOX to use as a drive. You can also add that to the DOSBOX configuration. So:
- did you RTFM (Read The Fine Manual)?
- did you use the DOSBOX 'MOUNT' command after plugging the USB stick in?
You are, after all, trying to use something that emulates MS-DOS from back before it grew a Windows graphical front-end, so you should expect to use it like you would have done back in the day. The MOUNT command is the equivalent of sticking a floppy into the floppy disk drive. Remember that drive letters were hard wired to disk partitions and floppy drives back then: Linux has no drive letters, so you have to use MOUNT to assign them to storage devices.
Long story short: you have to configure the Linux side of your DOSBIAN distribution to automount the USB media. /Then/ you can issue DOSBOX "MOUNT" commands to "mount" the linux mountpoint directory as a DOS device.
As I understand it, nobody wants to emulate modern hardware but rather emulate obsolete and unobtainable hardware on whatever the system offers now. For many things USB has become the only way to access them nowadays. Floppy drives, printers and modems come to mind, but there's more.
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The good news is that you can still buy 3.5" floppy drives in nice slimline plastic cases - from Amazon, so not hard to find. The bad news is that they connect via USB, not a 34 wire ribbon.
Older disk formats, take a look at the GoTek floppy emulator. These are popular with the vintage computer crowd because they connect via a 34 wire ribbon cable and all the old floppy interface chips will talk to them. They access floppy disk images stored on SD cards and can be configured to read and write almost any disk image you can imagine (8",
5.25", 3.5", single or double sided - for CP/M, MSDOS, Flex, OS-9,...).
About twice the price of a USB-connected 3.5" floppy
Why is it bad news that a modern 3.5" diskette drive connects by USB - unless you are planning to boot from it (*), all that matters is that the drive appears as a drive letter (eg A:) to Windows and hence a diskette in the drive can be read / written to. Likewise for other legacy drives such as
5.25" or 8" floppy, or Zip drive. I've seen three different connections for Zip drives over the years: parallel, IDE and USB. (**)
Having a floppy drive that connects by USB means that it can be connected to a modern PC, since most/all recent PCs don't have a 34-wire floppy interface on the motherboard.
(*) And if a PC's BIOS allows it to boot from a USB CD/DVD drive, then presumably it will boot from USB diskette drive.
(**) It wasn't until I got a parallel-connect Zip drive that I discovered that a PC's parallel port was even capable of reading as well as writing: I'd thought the only inputs to the PC were for flow-control. I later got an analogue-digitising box. This was used for editing camcorder footage to a VHS recorder: it grabbed a low-res preview video by parallel that was used for deciding on edit points, after which the required portions of the full-res video were copied by composite video from camcorder to VHS. It worked well as long as the segments to be copied were sufficiently close together that the camcorder could wind between one and the next within the time that a VHS recorder would stay in pause mode before it aborted to prevent tape wear. And of course you got VHS-editing coloured stripes at edit points. Definitely 1990s technology!
USB floppy drives can't read some disc formats. Floppy is a physical layer protocol - the controller drives the motors, sensors and raw data stream directly. USB floppy drives are block devices that are set up to read PC floppies and PC floppies alone, hardcoding those decisions in the drive firmware.
Some vintage computers did things differently to DOS and their floppies can't be read. Some formats (like Atari ST) are close enough to DOS that they work, but others don't.
The GoTek style interfaces expose all the raw signalling to the PC and have a PC driver implement formats like BBC Micro or Mac GCR or whatever in software. But then they typically don't interface with emulators (etc) that want to control the floppy themselves (beyond using the GoTek to make a disc image and plugging that into the emulator).
Ah, right. I didn't know that. I'd assumed that any USB device had the same capabilities as a legacy device with some other interface.
I remember having to use special software to make a DOS PC read a 5 1/4" floppy that had been created by a CP/M 3 computer that I had. I think it was called 22NICE. I imagine that was to send the relevant control signals to the motor and head so it could access non-DOS-standard track and sector count and spacing. I *think* the CP/M disk was 180 KB rather than 360 KB.
Somewhere I still have a 34-pin 3.5" (DD) drive. But I haven't got a PC that I could connect it to... I suppose it's possible that an old Windows XP that I keep for its analogue video capture card may have a floppy interface, though I probably haven't got the correct ribbon cable. Have I even still got a PC that can read IDE (as opposed to SATA) hard drives, I wonder? (*)
Fortunately AFAIK I copied anything I needed off diskette and ZIP disk to HDD or CD when I knew my next PC would not have those drives. I wonder if old copies of Harvard Graphics and Word Perfect (I think the DOS version) would work on Windows 7 or 10, or even whether the diskettes would still be readable.
How quickly old technology becomes obsolete...
My latest laptop does not have:
- parallel or RS-232 ports - no sad loss as I don't have my old dot-matrix printer that used parallel
- separate sockets for mike and line-out (just a 4-pole composite socket); no line-in capability (**)
- CD/DVD drive
- VGA socket (only HDMI) - no sad loss unless I want to connect an old 14" flat-screen 1024x768 monitor (do I really need to keep that?)
(*) I know I still have my IDE/SATA to USB interface device for accessing HDDs outside the PC that they came from.
(**) After a scare with the on-board sound card in a much older laptop, I bought a USB to mike/line-in/line-out adaptor. That was after I took my (battery-powered!) laptop into the bathroom to listen to music while I had a bath, and the steam did something to it. It worked again after it dried out, but by then I'd bought the external device.
For a while I used PLIP (like SLIP but using the parallel port) for a point to point network link for boxes without ethernet - it ran the parallel port with four bits each way.
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