Similar problem; no satisfactory solution. Mine was a Dell Inspirion 1100 + Ghost 2003. First time I tried to use Ghost to back up to an external drive, it crashed so badly I had to reinstall XP. Error message said something about needing drive space for a FAT file or partition, and I had no free space on the drive. My final "solution" was to pull the drive from the laptop and connect it to my main system for the backup. Not a satisfactory answer, but I suspect there may not be one, where laptops are concerned.