[Solved] Put in the first disk, do a DIR and see what is there. Remove it and put in a second disk and do a DIR and see the same contents. Reboot, and see different contents for the same 2nd diskette. USB floppy 3.5" 1.44, Connected directly to a USB port on the computer. Running MSDOS 6.22.
Solved by switching to FreeDOS. Be aware of the minor issue with FreeDOS format.exe = the /u flag is causing errors in the FD13 version. But one can do without it.
No other drivers for storage only ANSI.SYS because I like a pretty prompt. I did not try and empty dir or dir b: but I did install FreeDOS which does not seem to have this problem