guide
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.
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:". Note that the USB drive must be formatted as FAT32; otherwise it won't be listed. 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.
UNetbootin (Download Windows Version or Download Linux Version Download Mac OS X Version)
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. UNetbootin can also be run from Mac OS X, but note that only PCs (not Macs) can boot the resulting live USB drives.
On Windows XP, you must be logged on as an administrator; on Windows Vista and above, you will be prompted for permissions via UAC. Please see question #125389.
Additional dependencies (Linux Only): You will need the packages syslinux and p7zip-full installed (no dependencies on Windows)
Instructions for making your live USB persistent
UNetbootin running on Linux Mint:
UNetbootin running on Windows Vista: