Yesterday I helped a friend backup his free laptops to an external hard drive. We had several problems. One problem was that the DVD drive didn’t seem to work right on One Laptop. I think a reason might be that the DVD Drive is seldom used and it builds up dirt and dust and that interferes with the operation. But since it’s a laptop, the inability to take it out easily prevents me doing any maintenance on it easily, or even replacing it.
If this was a desktop PC, I would open it up and unplug the DVD and plug a spare DVD in temporarily to finish the backup. That can’t be done easily on a laptop.
One of the laptops has Windows 8 on it. I did a backup using Ghost32 11.5, and the hard disk image was only 12.5 GB, which I know from experience is much too small. It should be at least 40 or maybe 70 or 80GB depending on how much software is installed. My guess is that Ghost doesn’t recognize the Windows 8 type of file system on the hard disk. I’m going to have to do some more investigating to find out if this is true.