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
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
