Okay. Here I am working with a brand new pc build. I turned the hard drive into a new partition. I downloaded Linux 18.2 cinnamon and used unetbootin to make a bootable USB. I entered my PC bios and chose to boot from USB. My USB did post, but the post was GRUB2 interface, not Linux Mint.

Can someone please explain to me in easy to understand terms what I will have to do to successfully install this operating system onto my hard drive to the extent that I can remove the USB and have a working Linux pc?

Thanks in advance for any help you guys can offer.

Welcome to the forum!

When you switched the firmware to boot from USB, did you also disable the fast boot option? That usually seems to be necessary as well.

If that doesn't help, we need to look at the USB stick. You used unetbootin, but that isn't actually necessary these days. Try recreating the device with Windows image writer or LiLi as described here:
https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/744

Incidentally, did you verify the checksum of the downloaded iso?

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Yes I have disable fast boot and I have also enabled UEFI on my bios. The usb actually appears in the boot menu as UEFI sandisk
As for the 2nd part. No, and i'm not sure what that is and how i'm supposed to do that.

Currently, attempting to reimage the USB to see if that doesn't solve it.

when using win32 disk imager, the Linux iso does not show up in explorer. I still have unetbootin application if needed.

EDIT: changing .iso file to .img file
EDIT: write to USB. attempt to verify: failed at sector 3204096 "not sure what this means"
EDIT: rewrite usb stick using win32 loader and attempt to boot on fresh pc. Successful!

It is very possible your .iso file on Unetbootin isn't working properly.
That's the problem I had.
You should try using all the other .iso files on Unetbootin to see if they work.

Try 'Yumi' usb bootloader instead of Unetbootin.

It's not going to be easy using a Windows OS to try out a competing Linux OS.
The important thing is to get any Linux distro onto your usb.
After that, you can use your Linux usb to install Linux 18.2 cinnamon onto a partition on your hard drive.

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Large files like ISOs frequently become corrupted on download. So various check sums are used to compare your downloaded file to the providers file.

When I was using windows, I used "hashcalc" program to determine the check sums. And the LinuxMint website uses "sha256" checksum.

So fire up "hashcalc" and put a check for "sha256" and uncheck everything else. Then compare your result to the hash sums given on the Mint website.

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Thanks for all the help guys. Like my earlier edit states. Re-imaging the usb with win32 loader helped me boot it successfully. Also, thanks for the explanations on how the large file may have been corrupted during my first attempt.

Will I need to do anything else to make sure my copy of Linux is valid? It's already been completely installed on the hard drive as of this point.

Good to hear you have a Linux distro!

The distro isn't entirely legit.
As you know, it's a Win32 usb bootloader version of the linux distro.

Your version of the Linux distro probably doesn't have persistence i.e. it doesn't save all your desktop settings etc when you reboot the distro.

Your 'live' version of your distro is meant for trying it out and familiarising yourself with a non-Windows setup.

To have a proper version, you need to use your new linux distro to install another distro to a seperate partition.
This time though, the .iso file will not come from Win32.
It will come from the Linux Mint repository instead.

But you'll find more of that from the Linux Mint community.

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Interesting. I'll check it out, thanks again for all the information.

No, everything should be ok. Using the check sum programs as previously suggested validates the downloaded image.

Win32diskimager is a Windows utility to create a bootable flash drive from an ISO image similar to UnetBootin or rufus. The flash drive is a live version but what is installed on the hard drive is a regular version which uses grub as the bootloader.

I don't think OP has done a checksum on the .iso file because he indicated he didn't know what a 'checksum' was.

So the Win32 program has installed a linux distro without a checksum validation.
Also, the Microsoft proprietary software has changed the .iso to a .img file. Why?
Finally, a checksum is not entirely foolproof. It is better to download the .iso directly from the Linux Mint repository.

However in this instance, the .iso has been downloaded from a Windows OS and installed using Win32 software.
It is interesting to see Microsoft making linux installs so quick and easy.

I've never used Win32 Disk Imager so I can not comment on why the extension needs to be img versus iso. At one time an ISO extension typically meant an ISO9660 CD image file but it sometimes used for any type of image file.

It isn't Microsoft proprietary software. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2).

https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/

I download ISO files using Windows all the time although I typically burn them to DVD versus a USB drive and also run them in a VM.

Since this page is still getting comments, I will provide my latest update. I did as trumpforprez told me to do and I remade the iso-usb in iso form and plugged it up to the Linux distro pc. It ran a bunch of green 'OK' strings then I was able to change my settings like he said I would. Upon restarting, I noticed that it's actually saving my changes to the background and things like that. Also, marking as solved. Appreciate all the input. It was actually quite easy to correct my mistake from the advice I received from users in this community!

What does this even mean? Where do you suppose the OP is getting the ISO? And you're saying he doesn't need to check the file if he gets it directly from Mint? Do you think that getting it from the Mint website guarantees that it's not corrupted?