Linux Mint Forums

A friend is interested in putting Mint on the family Windows laptop. Due to low family approval, he wants to put on a separate partition and only see it when he puts in his USB stick with boot files on - so that when the computer boots in the regular fashion, it just picks up WinXP boot loader and boots into Windows.
Is there an easy way to do this through the Mint installer, or will we have to apply additional magic?

EASY...

Use the "something else" option to install to the required partition then make sure that the install grub option points to the USB stick that you want to use to boot to mint. “Device for boot loader installation:” to your Flash drive.
Please see http://usbtux.hostzi.com/How_to and specifically http://usbtux.hostzi.com/somethingelse
Using the advanced install manager. An excellent way to dual boot your computer without installing to the same hard drive as windows
Doesn't show the specific of using a usb for grub but its easy enough to get the idea.

I used to use this method exactly, a few years ago.

Excellent. Thank you, I will pass on the link.