Running Norton Ghost 8 using a USB Hard Drive

I have a bunch of images from ghost that I use to rebuild PC's all the time for my company. I've used a flash drive to boot into dos and into ghost using a bare IDE drive without any issues at all. For the longest time I wanted to get that drive into an enclosure to protect is and to not wear out the ide port. The problem I'm having now is I cannot get the usb drive to be detected. I did some research and found that version 8 did not support usb hard drives so I was able to find just the dos version of 8.3 with the usb dos drivers. I still can't get the drive to be recognized. I just about tore my hair out yesterday trying different ways/configurations/altering the autoexec.bat to get it to work but with no success. I really don't want to continue to use a bare drive to extract the images. Does anyone here possibly know of a solution that could work for me?

Thanks very much in advance