I need a Linux Mint Live flashdrive, ideally with persistence. Can’t create one myself, so will buy from amazon.
Amazon offers a number of flashdrives containing a single distro; others contain multiple distros. Both single+multiple distros are priced about $15-$20.
Is there a disadvantage to a Live flashdrive containing multiple distros, compared to only one distro? Such as:
–64GB - 20-in-1, Bootable USB Drive 3.2 for Linux & Windows 11, Zorin, Mint, Kali, Ubuntu, Tails, Debian, Supported UEFI and Legacy
–32GB 9-in-1 Linux bootable USB for Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Mx Linux, Zorin OS, Linux Lite, ElementaryOS etc. Try or Install Linux Top 9 Linux for BeginnersBoot Repair multiboot USB
–64GB 25-in-1 Linux MultiBoot USB (USB 3) | 2025 | Top 25 Linux for Beginners | Portable Boot Repair | OS Toolkit
Compared to:
–Beamo Linux Mint Cinnamon 22.1 (Most Recent Version) 64-bit Bootable USB Flash Drive, Live USB for Installing and Repairing Linux Mint
–Linux Mint OS Bootable USB Flash Thumb Drive for PC – Great for Work Entertainment and Everyday Tasks Operating System
I don’t understand why a live flashdrive with many distros would be priced the same as a flashdrive with only one distro–??
Why can’t you make one? This is pretty trivial, e.g. in Windows with free software like Rufus.
I don’t think making a multiboot one isn’t harder than a single boot one. The sacrifice is you have less partition for storing the files if a lot of the space it taken up by other distros.
Install Ventoy on your USB and you can then drop 100’s of live ISO’s on your USB. Easy to use too. Plug the USB in a computer, reboot, and then choose which distro you want to load. If you want persistence on Mint, it offers instructions on how to do that.
You don’t need to buy one when you can do it yourself (my opinion).
Are you sure you would trust a random OS from a random online seller? It could be preloaded with malware and spyware and a rooted kernel and you’d be none the wiser.
It should only take a few minutes to make one yourself, or ask a friend to make one for you?
I have not had any luck getting persistence to work with Ventoy, and that’s one of the OP’s requirements.
Part of that is my stubbornness on insisting on using a file for persistence, instead of a partition. I haven’t tried to make it work with a partition, because that isn’t what I want.
For things where I don’t care about persistence, Ventoy is a big convenience.
Out of curiosity, may I ask why? Doesn’t using a single file for the whole image increase the risk of data loss, corruption, etc.? If it’s just a USB drive (instead of many images running off a shared disk or such), what’s the advantage of using a file over a partition?
The single file is just the persistence data. It is an encrypted blob that is used as the overlay filesystem to save any changes I make while booted into the image. There are several pro-file and con-partition reasons.
The biggest thing in favor of using a file is that I can backup or duplicate the entire USB stick using normal file commands, so cp, rsync, or drag and drop are all that’s needed to create a new bootable USB drive (assuming I only care about UEFI boot).
There are other minor pros, like being able to resize the file without having to reformat and reload the whole USB drive.
The biggest anti-partition problem has been issues I’ve had with using the USB drive on other operating systems. Sometimes I’d plug it in and because there is a non-FAT partition, the OS asks to format it. Sometimes it fails to mount the FAT32 partition because there is an unrecognized partition. Some OSes work if the unrecognized partition is first, others if it is last.
Modern OSes usually are fine, but one of the things I do a lot with my rescue USB is interact with old computers. Often pulling off some data, and then wiping them, so using something that works on as many systems as possible is important.
+1 on Ventoy. I have a Ventoy drive with install media for both current versions of Windows, the current release of Clonezilla, and the current revision of SystemRescue.
The only time I had problems with it, it turns out the system I was working with had defective memory, and just about any live OS image would probably fail under those conditions.
Due to a malfunctioning harddrive [Windows 10] on my Lenovo ThinkPad, I get on the net by booting from a Linux Mint 20 USB live flashdrive, connect with WiFi, using Firefox 77.
Is the process the same if I download the ISO to another flashdrive? Then install to another flashdrive? Not sure how it works–
I’m surprised that Firefox 77 works as well as it does, though unsupported on some sites–I can read but not log in to Straight Dope–using library computer right now–
I was able to install Mint 9 on a self-built PC years ago, but I’ve never had a trouble-free installation/configuration experience with Linux–once installed, it’s great, but the process for me has always been difficult–got a lot of help from Robert Bruce Thompson’s forum–hence my Q about buying a live flashdrive. It’s worth $20 for me to avoid the experience–maybe now, things are better than 10-15-yrs ago—?
If you installed on a laptop 10-15 years ago, you might’ve been dealing with Broadcom network driver signing, which was indeed a nightmare back then and is much better now.
The above mentioned tools like Ventoy will probably work to make your own through a current live drive, as long as you have 2 free USB ports for both.
You should have a fully functional Live USB with whatever OS you like (persistence requires a few more steps try the above first). Plug it into a computer and reboot it.
My advice is to ask a trusted friend if this all seems too difficult for you. Hopefully you are close to someone who has the capabilities to do so.
If everything goes well, think about a longer term solution for your Thinkpad and simply backup your data onto a separate disk and use this live ISO/USB to install Mint right onto the computer. Or reinstall windows, or take the whole thing in for repair, or change the hard drive? or whatever.
I didn’t see this. Yes, you can install a Linux OS right onto a flash drive, which you can keep plugged into a computer as its main OS. Flash drives are not meant to be used in such ways, but people do it and it’ll work (however I’m sure this wears the drives out faster, so take that into your considerations).
Also think about replacing your hard drive for a longer term solution.
I think the easiest way to do what you want is with Rufus.
This will require a Windows computer where you have admin access. This is necessary to reformat and write to the USB drive, it shouldn’t change anything else on the Windows system (other than downloading some files).
If you can do that, then download Rufus, the portable version is fine. Also download your preferred Linux Mint ISO (about 3GB).
Run Rufus, and point it at your USB drive (it will be wiped clean), and your Mint ISO. You should see an option about creating a persistent partition. Create it as large as you’d like. Let Rufus do it’s thing, and you should then have a Mint USB drive that is bootable with a persistent partition.
It is not a permanent solution, but will at least get you through the period of repairing or replacing your laptop.
If you have two USB drives, and they are large enough, you should be able to create a persistent setup from your old Mint 9 rescue image using Ventoy. My instructions will involve using the command line, because I don’t know any better than that.
Boot with your old Mint rescue
Once booted plugin your other USB drive, that you want to be your new Mint image
Download Ventoy for linux
Extract Ventoy
Open a terminal
Use cd Downloads to change to the Downloads directory—modify this to change to whatever directory you saved Ventoy in
Extract Ventoy with tar -zxvf ventoy-1.1.05-linux.tar.gz
Install Ventoy
change into the Ventoy directory you just extracted with cd ventoy-1.1.05
Run sudo ./VentoyGUI.x86_64
Select your new USB drive
Note what it’s device is, probably sdb, but possibly sdc
Select install
Download and save the Mint ISO—I hope the new USB automounts, that will make this much easier
If not, run sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt replacing sdb with whatever device you noticed from the install step (so use /dev/sdc1, for example)
Download your desired Mint ISO, and save it to the new USB drive
which is possibly on /mnt, or wherever Mint automounted it
You might have to change some settings in Firefox so it asks you where to save stuff
Your looking for the images.zip file under the “Assets” heading
Go to your terminal
If you are still in the Downloads/ventoy-1.1.05 directory, then you should be able to run unzip ../images.zip to extract all of the disk images into a directory called images
Pick the size you want (256MB up to 4GB) and then copy one of the ext4 casper images to your new USB drive cp images/persistence_xfs_1GB_casper-rw.dat.7z /mnt for example, but use the path where your new drive is installed, which should be the same as where you saved the Mint ISO
Unpack the disk image by running
cd to where you just copied the file, so cd /mnt for example
run 7z x persistence_xfs_1GB_casper-rw.dat.7z (correcting the file name as necessary
this may take a minute, as it will have to write a bunch of data to your USB drive
Get back to your Ventoy directory with cd ~/Downloads/ventoy-1.1.05
Setup the Ventoy persistence plugin
Run sudo bash ./VentoyPlugson.sh /dev/sdb (or whatever device)
It will put a URL on the screen, something like http://localhost:24681
You might be able to click on that to open it in the browser, otherwise type into the browser’s address bar
From the lefthand menu, select “Persistence plugin”
Click “+Add”
Type in the full path to your Mint ISO
Type in the full path to the persistence image you copied and un7zipped
If you have a typo or the path wrong, it won’t work
If it works, you should see page with a few green “OK” boxes
Go back to your terminal, and type ctrl-c
You are done
shutdown
remove the old rescue disk
boot from the new rescue disk
there will be lots of boot menus
Select your Mint ISO
Select normal boot
Select with persistence
Select the top entry from the Mint boot menu
If all of that worked, you should be watching the Mint logo as your computer boots, and get a desktop after a bit
Test and see if persistence is working by creating a file, rebooting and seeing if it is still there
I might have missed a step, or some things might not be clear. If you need assistance, ask a question.
ETA: Your data in the persistent partition or file is not encrypted or otherwise protected. Anyone who gets access to the USB drive will be able to see it. Treat it appropriately.
