Ok, I got a flyer in the mail yesterday from Best Buy having a Huge sale on USB 2.0 drives. So I thought what the hell I will purchase an 8GB drive and a 128 GB with the idea that I would create a live USB drive with the 8GB and use my 128 GB for storage of my Linux programs. Well, today I used window 8.1 to make my live Linux Mint USB drive. That procedure seemed to go ok. So, I went ahead and shut down windows. I started my laptop and pressed the escape key which if you time it right brings up a special Boot Menu. I selected the device that was my USB drive and it did its magic. I got Linux Mint running. Now comes my problem after about 3 minutes of running Linux Mint two things will either happen. First, I will get a frozen screen, meaning my mouse pointer refuse to move from whatever spot on the screen it landed and any control of the laptop is lost. Second, my mouse pointer will move in whatever direction I move the mouse, but whatever option I click on won’t come up. The only thing to do when either issue comes up is to press the shutdown button on the laptop keyboard.
Now I thought I might be able to fix these issues, if I could somehow remove all information on the USB and start over making a new bootable USB drive using the same USB drive.
Also before i forget to mention, if you use the Cinnamon version,
and your laptop is a slightlly older model, and its using an intel igpu.
Then it “could be” that your screen freezes wenn changing screen resolution.
If that is the case, then you need to delete an old legacy X11 driver.
You can check the release notes on Linux Mint´s webpage for that,
in which they pointed out to the said issue.
+1 for Rufus. Never had a problem with it. I think you might need to download a file before you can burn linux iso files but I’m not sure, it might be only for old distros (or an older version of Rufus). The bootable stick should also have an option under “advanced boot options” (or some such) to verify integrity. I had a flash drive fail this once before, never hurts to check. Maybe try 18.2 XFCE.
Also, did you try changing to a different tty? Ctrl alt F1 should bring you to a black screen with a small text prompt at the top. If that works, it’s either the mouse or X.
Did you check the hash on the .iso download? I have had a couple of downloads get messed up and cause weird bugs. Pretty much any time I fail to check the integrity of the download will be when I am going to have a problem.
No I didn’t try to changing to a different tty, but what I did do was use Rufus and change the Linux distro on the same USB drive from Linux Mint to Fendora, and bam success. Now I just have to backup my hard drive than can install Fendora 27 to it.