I have not done this, but I have changed hard drives and used Norton Ghost with no problems to the P5 install. So if you have a spare drive, ghost it. CD-R sounds great too. Also, I recall a while back that when you reinstall P5, you need to run in demo mode then install sr2.1 or higher so as to bypass the handshake licensing scheme. I think you only get three shots at licensing then its dead unless you call Curious Labs, so no need to waste one if you can avoid it. Do a search here. There were many who had to uninstall and reinstall back in the early days of P5. Also, I do not recall reading any posts that complained about losing the runtime so that's a good sign.