Hi Dennis and welcome to linux.org, albeit under trying circumstances.
Hope you are catching zzzz's right now after such an ordeal. I am from DownUnder so we may be on and off at different times, but there are a number of willing and knowledgeable people here, whom can pick up the ball and run with it if I am not around.
I'll be firing a lot of questions at you (because we haven't got a lot to go on), so I hope you can answer them as best you can.
Read through to the bottom of this Post before attempting what I ask of you in the Linux Specific part.
IF CURRENTLY USING WINDOWS, AND WISHING TO DUALBOOT
- Am I correct that you are wishing to dualboot with Windows, if so, which one are you using - 7, 8, or 10?
- Do you have a Recovery Plan/disk/stick in place should Windows head south for the winter?
- Do you have your personal data backed up?
- Have you used Windows System Information utility before? If so/not, press the Windows key and R or get to where you can run the command "msinfo32" (example below from my Win 10)
- Give as as much information as you can from it about RAM, hard drive capacity, Processor, &c and whether it is running on UEFI or Legacy (CSM)
LINUX SPECIFIC
- Did you get your Linux Mint .iso from linuxmint.com or if not, where?
- Which Linux Mint "flavour" is it, eg Cinnamon, Mate, or Xfce with the 19, and the same plus with KDE in the 18.3 series? The name of the .iso will reveal.
- From Windows, if you are using it, open a blank Notepad document or similar, and at linuxmint.com downloads page, there is a part "Don't forget to verify your iso". Click that. It is poorly written and assumes the User is already using Linux. Click 19 and 18.3 in turn and from within each of those pages resulting, click "sha256sum.txt" and copy the relevant hashsum for the .iso you downloaded into your Notepad document, label them and save the doc.
- Armed with that, go to https://bhoover.com/how-to-verify-checksum-windows/ and download (free) Raymond's MD5 and SHA Checksum Utility. Use it to run against your downloaded .iso's and see that the results it gives are identical with what you put in your Notepad doc.
Sounds like a PITA? It's worth it. For you it means you did not get a dodgy download, for us it confirms or eliminates an option in helping you.
The fact that you have obviously
got a download,
got it burned to USB or disk (which?), and
got to the installer exercise ... is promising, and the not-so-cute dots bizzo may yet have to be cracked.
If you are patient, we have your back, and will get you up and running.
Cheers
Chris Turner
wizardfromoz
BTW almost forgot, here's my pics from Windows
and