Today i find a way to bakup and restore my boot camp partition(NTFS): In parallels, add boot camp partition as the second hard disk, start the virtual machine and use norton ghost to clone and restore the boot camp partition. It works, the boot camp partition is still bootable. But the strange thing is that the restoration takes too much time: backing up takes 4 min, restoration takes 76 min! backing up speed is 336MB/min and restoring speed is 17MB/min. i had thought that perhaps parallels writes to the boot camp partition much slower than reads from it, but when i copy a big file to and from the boot camp partition i see no difference in the speed. Maybe parallels is just slow at the block-to-block writting into a real disk partition
I don't know the reason it takes so long, but if you just want to backup your Boot Camp partition I would recommend using Winclone instead.
thank you, a perfect solution if winclone really does its work without bugs i will try it the other day. but i think handling NTFS inside Windows environment is much safer. winclone is "built on the open source ntfstools", which i heard is sometimes unstable or unreliable. anyone had experiences with winclone? Tell me if it is reliable.