How To Install Linux Mint | Create Bootable Flash Drive

Installing Linux Mint Alongside Windows Part 2

Now we are ready to install Linux Mint alongside our Windows operating system. Turn your computer off.  Take your bootable flash drive with Linux Mint on it and insert it into your computer.

Now turn your computer back on and while it is booting up you want to keep on pressing the keys that will open up your boot menu. More than likely, if you are on a HP, it will be the “Esc” key. If you are not sure you can reference the previous page to find your model and see what key to use. For the computer that I am using in the graphic, the boot menu key is F9.

Now you will see a boot menu appear. It will look something like this, your will probably say Windows on the top. My USB flash drive is that USB1 – UEFI OS(KingstonDataTraveler G3 PMAP) and I need that to be on top. Using the arrows on my keyboard I am going to navigate down so I highlight my USB Flash drive.

Now I am going to hit enter to boot from my flash drive.

The next thing I see is this. I am going to select the top one which states, “Start Linux Mint 20.02 Cinnamon 64-bit.

After selecting the top I will see the Linux Mint desktop load. It looks like this. I can check the operating system out and see how it functions on my computer. The next thing I want to do is install it alongside my windows so I click the “Install Linux Mint” icon on the desktop here.

After clicking install I will see a window appear. It says the following. I click on “English” and select the Continue button.

Select Language

The next thing I see is a box to choose my keyboard layout. There are many but am going to choose English (US).

Type of Language

The next box I see is this. We want to install multimedia codecs because it makes our desktop more useful. We also want to be able to install 3rd party drivers. This is so if we ever want to try someone’s software we can install their drivers to use their software. This could be video editing, photo editing and more. So I tick that box and also tick the box that says configure secure boot and enter a password. Then I click continue.

Installing Linux Mint to Overwrite Windows

If you only want to run Linux Mint and get rid of Windows entirely, the process is much simpler. Basically, when you get to the questions about the installation type, select Erase disk and install Linux Mint. This is the only difference from installing it alongside Windows. You do not have to allocate space if you do it this way because you are just going to delete Windows and all its files.

If you want to install alongside windows, please go to the next page.