I'm sure this is here somewhere but I can't find it. I have a disc image on a stick and I was told it would virtually install itself. I can't find an install button. am I missing something?

Did you boot the stick and are you running a live session? If so there is an icon that looks like a physical CD/DVD disk with the words install linux mint. May I suggest reading the installation guide.

https://linuxmint-installation-guide...t/install.html

"virtually"

Could this be a virtual machine image?

I assumed virtually was just a figure of speech. I couldn't decide if the OP just copied the ISO to the flash drive or actually wrote as image.

I downloaded from the linux website to the flashdrive a disc image called linuxmint 21.1-cinnamon-64bit
It doesn't open, there is no boot button

It does not appear like you created bootable media.
https://linuxmint-installation-guide...test/burn.html

Do you really need to dual boot assuming your PC has enough RAM? May I suggest running Mint in a virtual machine using VirtualBox as a starting point. There is no need to resize or worry about existing partitions, messing up or deleting Windows or messing up bootloaders. If you decide you want to try another distribution just delete the Mint VM which is nothing more then a couple of files on your Windows drive.

i'm trying to switch from win10 to mint. I need to get mint running and open a new email account so I can move my contacts from outlook

So what does happen when you boot your mint usb stick? Are you able to boot the live environment and just cannot find the install option?

Your language reads like you had a USB stick with a filesystem on it, and copied the image you downloaded onto that existing filesystem. That's not how a Mint .iso file downloaded can be useful. The .iso image needs to replace everything existing on the stick up to the size of the .iso image, making whatever the rest of the stick contains inaccessible. Most people call the process burning, based upon the physics involved doing the same thing with a CD-R or DVD-R. Once you've managed to successfully burn the image to your stick, you can boot from it, and it's from that boot that it could "virtually install itself".

An iso image copied to a USB memory stick won't boot.


Copy the Linux Mint iso image to somewhere on your Windows disk,

Download and install the BalinaEtcher app on your Windows system.

Plug in a USB flash drive (at least 4Gb capacity)

Double click on it to start the App.

Select the iso file (Flash from file) as the source file and the USB drive (select Target) as the destination then hit "Flash". (Check the blurb on the website.)

The iso will be written to the flash drive and the bootable image verified.

You can now boot the USB drive and you'll be running a "Live" version of Linux Mint.

If you're happy with it click the "Install Linux Mint" icon and follow the prompts.

Hope that helps.

Play Bonny!

Thanks folks. I've downloaded etcher and hopefully will get this rolling.

It can if the disk has had Ventoy installed onto it.

No need to waste an entire USB drive on a single ISO when one can have as many as will fit AND continue to use it as a regular USB storage device.

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Actually it usually can. As long as you cp it to the device, not onto an existing partition. i.e. "cp filename.iso /dev/sdb"

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@boughtonp and enigma9o7, I stand corrected. Thanks for the clarification.

From the OP's original post: it looked like he/she hadn't installed the .iso on the memory stick, just dumped it on verbatim.

Using BalinaEtcher (Other applications are available...) seemed the easiest way for the OP to make a bootable image on a USB stick and go from there.

@OP, once you boot Mint from the USB stick you are running a "Live" version in memory, your original disk is not affected in any way. To install to the main drive you double click the "Install Mint" icon at the top left of the desktop and follow the prompts.

My

Play Bonny!

And if you want to "first take 'baby steps,'" virtual machines are a good way to start. You can run Linux in a window on your existing (Win10) host environment for a time so that you can "kick the tires," so to speak, before diving in with both feet. See VirtualBox. Performance is essentially just as good as if you were running it on "bare iron," but you cannot disrupt the host environment. (Essentially all of "the cloud™" is virtual.)

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