Help with a SmartDisk Firelite 40GB

I have been using a Firelite 40GB external drive by Smartdisk for backing up files and ghosting images of systems that we develop for monitoring. (These include older and newer Optiplex, Dimension and Inspiron units) The drive has worked great but with my newest laptop the Inspiron 8600 it won't recognize it when booting to PC_DOS for ghosting purposes. I have always noticed that it detects the drive as a generic IOMEGA drive but has never failed to allow me to create a ghost image on it or write a ghost image from it except with the new laptop.  In Windows the drive works fine with the 8600 (seen as USB1.1 with no external power source or as USB 2.0 when there is an external power source).  I like this little drive because it is very transportable and hope someone can help me get the problem resolved. My old laptop an Inspiron 8000 also with Windows XP Pro it works fine. Please help because I don't want to have to buy the slim Iomega 60GB drive, I would rather save the $260 for the upcoming Godzilla festival in Chicago this July . Thank You for any help given