Creating and booting from a Live USB drive can be used as an alternative to the standard approach of burning and booting a Linux CD. This is particularly useful for installing Mint on computers that have trouble booting from CDs, or for those who can't or don't want to burn a CD.

Graphical installation using UNetbootin

Summary

UNetbootin provides a GUI to create Live USB drives from ISO files. To create a Live USB using UNetbootin, download an ISO file, select it under UNetbootin's "diskimage" option, and specify your target USB disk under "Drive:". After pressing OK, wait as the ISO is extracted to your USB drive; once done, you will have a bootable Linux Mint Live USB drive.

Downloads

UNetbootin (Download Windows Version or Download Linux Version)

Linux Mint ISO file, if you haven't already downloaded one

Requirements

1 GB or larger USB drive, formatted as FAT32 (most USB drives come formatted as FAT32 by default, but if you need to format it, on Windows, go to My Computer->right click your USB drive->format, or on Linux, use GParted or another partition manager)

Supported operating systems: Windows 2000 and above OR a modern Linux distribution

Additional dependencies (Linux Only): You will need the packages syslinux and p7zip-full installed (no dependencies on Windows)

More information

Guide on the Mint Forums (currently being integrated into this wiki page)

Screenshots

UNetbootin running on Linux Mint:

UNetbootin running on Windows Vista: