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Retrocomputing

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    DOS may not have any built-in USB support, but the BIOS firmware often does. When booting from a USB drive in ‘legacy BIOS’ mode, it is usually presented as an additional hard or floppy drive by the BIOS disk interrupt calls, so that the bootloader (and by extension DOS) will have access to it after all. (Although that only works until the first reboot, and you may have to deal with drive letters changing…) Commented Aug 9, 2022 at 6:07
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    And the ‘setup cannot find a file’ explanation is wrong. I simulated this by renaming CAB files, and it didn’t behave that way. Commented Aug 10, 2022 at 5:26
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    If it's not dynamic, when a file is missing like I said, then it must be scripted to happen at a specific point in the install. So if you have a floppy install version of the setup it will behave differently than the CD install version. What's odd is that it doesn't usually change drive letters like that. They don't assume you have more than one floppy drive so I must assume that this system is presenting both A: and B: drives. The keyboard failing does suggest that some sort of driver change occurred during the setup. Maybe the A: drive was lost when the USB controller went away. Commented Aug 10, 2022 at 15:42