Hi,
System crash. I have to re install Manjaro. I want to use KDE. The installer does’nt give me the opton to wipe the disk. How to I proceed?
Melissa
Edit - I need a separate home partition…thanks
If you choose manual partitioning in the installer, then you should normally have the option to delete the partition and create a new one in its place.
Just make sure that you don’t wipe your /home partition if you have that as a separate filesystem. And if it’s a dual-boot system with Microsoft Windows, then you also shouldn’t wipe the EFI system partition or any of the Windows partitions. (Note: The EFI system partition should be set up to be mounted at /boot/efi (in all-lowercase).)
You should normally have full control in manual partitioning mode.
Can I understand from that that the /home shoould survive the reinstall?
If it’s on a separate partition and you tell the installer not to format it, then yes, the contents of /home will be spared.
Wow! Okay, this is a light inthe dark. What if…I want to install IN the existing parition?
I fried the current install (5 year old XFCE) and it is inside a separate partition…
edit : I selected the “replace partition” and clicked on the sda5 (where the OS lives) and checked the “reuse /dev/sda6 as home…”
edit 2 : so the grub will…follow? I’ll install KDE (newest, this time)
You’ve been using Manjaro for 5 years on same machine, and still don’t know how to use backup?
Backup, install, you can always restore your files. By overwriting to existing /home partition without formatting it you asking for trouble.
I always do a backup of the data…hence the separate /home partition…
Not necessarily. XFCE is a GTK-based environment, while Plasma is a Qt-based environment. They usually stay out of each other’s way ─ the configuration files are named differently.
If on the other hand you’d be installing GNOME over XFCE (or vice versa), then yes, you’d be asking for trouble.
Ehm, maybe a silly question…what is the console commant to find out where your OS is installed? What partitonN?
(so nervous…)
That’s a tricky one, and there might be a way of getting to know that, but then you must not be in the installer.
If you are in the live mode of the install USB/CD/DVD and you open up a terminal, then you can use the following commands to try and fix things in a broken installation… 
sudo su -
manjaro-chroot -a
This will scan your drive and will present you with a choice of GNU/Linux installations on the drive to chroot into. If you only have one installation, press 0 ─ that’s a zero, not the letter “O”.
You can then issue the command mount to see what is mounted. You’ll probably want to filter that down to only what’s on /dev/sda, so then you would instead use the command…
mount | grep sda
Once you know the partition that was used for / (i.e. the root filesystem), then you can write that down, and then for safety’s sake, you can look at /etc/fstab (inside the chroot environment) to see what partition your /home was on, although I suspect that it will be listed there with its UUID instead of its device special file. But that’s okay ─ you can write that down too and then compare that against…
lsblk -afs
Again, you must be doing this while not running the installer, and if you’re going to be running the installer afterwards, then I recommend rebooting (from the installer USB/CD/DCD) first, so that nothing will be mounted on the drive, because that would normally prevent the installer from formatting the filesystem in question.
Yikes. All I want is to wipe the drive and reinstall, I just made a backup…or, install in the existing partition, as seen on the screenshot…
Well, if you have a backup and you’re certain of its integrity, then you can just go ahead and replace the partition, as you initially intended. But I’m just giving you the safest way to make sure you’re not overwriting your /home, or some other partition that contains data. 
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The screenshot is not very clear, I’m afraid. I cannot read the text on the screen.
You…are an angel 
So, if I can install IN the existing partition and replace the broken install, and the grub will follow, and the /home will be okay, I’m in…
I am at the moment super nervous, I’m about to faint…hold my hand
Ill make a new one, hang on
Don’t worry, it can be done. I’ve even imported the home directory of another distribution on a few occasions. 
Is the very long blue one your /home? If so, it’s looking good.
That’s the one…indeed
do I try to make a screenshot? I may need to upload it…
No, it’s okay. It’s just that I didn’t see a name for that, and I assumed that it was either your /home or unformatted space.
