You can, but I don't know how. Something about making images of the disks and whatnot.

Read the Windows 9x on DosBox guide: Windows 9x DOSBox Guide (Not officially supported)

I may be stating the obvious, but it is Dosbox's goal to replace
dos in general. Consider the prompt you see (graphically) as the
same dos version 2..7 prompt.
The only reason you may wish to boot disk images
is to load device drivers or specific environments (not everything
in dos is emulated.. yet).

You could accomplish the former with the attached (2in1) zipfile;
they both claim to load device drivers from the commandline;
note1: not extensively tested though.
note2: you may need a customised dosbox build if your drivers access external hardware.
note3: no version of dosbox supports data to/from PCI/ISA cards. (Outside the scope of 'games')

And you have to beware of this: If you boot MS-DOS inside dosbox, you will not be able to use the dosbox-shortkeys any more. Dosbox will still be running in the background, though, but you will lose the kinds of control mechanisms that make using dosbox so convenient, e.g. lowering the cycles or changing the cpu core.

kruwi wrote:

And you have to beware of this: If you boot MS-DOS inside dosbox, you will not be able to use the dosbox-shortkeys any more. Dosbox will still be running in the background, though, but you will lose the kinds of control mechanisms that make using dosbox so convenient, e.g. lowering the cycles or changing the cpu core.

I have to disagree with that. I use MS-DOS 6.22 in dosbox, by mounting a hard disk image that has ms-dos installed in it, then booting from it with the boot command of dosbox, and after MS-DOS 6.22 boots up, I can still use the hotkeys, the things that don't work are the dosbox "Z:" drive commands like mount and exit, but you can simply mount something if you want to use it in dosbox by writing the mount command for it in the autoexec section of dosbox.conf (before the line that boots up dos 6.22 so it will still accept the command) and you can exit dosbox by pressing ctrl+f9 or going to window mode by alt+enter and closing the dosbox window.
The only thing that's somewhat limiting is that the other mounted drives must be images too, because if dosbox boots a real dos from an image it will no longer accept mounted directories only mounted images as other drives for some reason.

because if dosbox boots a real dos from an image it will no longer accept mounted directories

You should ask microsoft why they didn't add dosbox support back then.

Yeah, I think the main reasons an emulated real dos won't see a previously mounted directory as a drive are because of the NTFS file system, the seemingly "infinite" size of a contemporary hard disk compared to what size hard disks had in the dos era, and that a mounted directory drive doesn't have data for cylinders, heads and sectors which are required for mounting a hard disk image in dosbox.

because of the NTFS file system

No. The mounted drives directly interface with dosbox, thus if you load
another DOS that version would have to do the same interfacing, which it
does not because it is not prepared for it.

I really can't understand why anybody would like to install MS-DOS in DOSBox, the DOSBox environment is far more efficient in terms of memory management and and most needed drivers are already included. I mean, it's good enough to cheat Windows 3.X, what else could we want?

I only miss an internal editor (EDIT), but I guess I can use Windows Notepad or the FreeDOS equivalent if the need becomes urgent.

As far as I remember, EDIT works fine inside DOSBox. Most DOS programs do.

Guess so, I just wish it was included. That or some free replacement.

I've been using QuickBasic4.5 in DOS and it seems to work fine, even spits out EXEs I can run in real DOS. I don't see why EDIT would fail.

Edit works, Neville's point is a different one.

I really can't understand why anybody would like to install MS-DOS in DOSBox, the DOSBox environment is far more efficient in terms of memory management and and most needed drivers are already included. I mean, it's good enough to cheat Windows 3.X, what else could we want?

If you intend to abuse DOSBox with programs that are not games you may run in some trouble because DOSBox does not provide all functionality that MSDOS does.

Care to elaborate on that, h-a-l? I am curious to know what DOSBox doesn't provide in terms of applications like Win3.11, because I installed my Win3.11 For Workgroups on my emulated drive using DOSBox, then installed my SB16 software, and everything works wonderfully. Amused the heck out of me the first time I threw it on my flash-drive and pulled it up on somebody else's computer, they came in and turned off the screen saver, saw Windows 3.11 and freaked!

Win 3.11 only works because the DOSBox devs made an exception and added the functions for it. You can still see a few loose ends (DOS window, WfW 3.11 net command, 32-bit harddisk support come to mind). And there are other applications that use APIs which are not or only partially implemented in DOSBox and thus refuse to work.

Time and date functions?

Those would be the smallest issue 😉 Things like the Ctrl-C or DOS data structures or block devices or internationalisation APIs... but it's only few apps that are affected.

Didn't think about 32bit disk support. I'll check out the net command and DOS window though, as I have not toyed with them yet.

As for time and date, could they simply make those functions and have them call the real system's time/date functions? Only worry would be Y2K issues. Y2K got my 286, so I had to pull the battery and set it back to 1980. My 286 is 20yrs behind everything else here, 🤣!