Question about live iso and persistence...

[Ilovevag2022]

First off I'm pretty new to Linux but I'm really enjoying it. I have atleast 3 hours a day sitting around doing nothing while getting paid to do so. I have a old pos PC that runs windows XP. My boss is cool with me biting into Linux as long as I contain everything on my USB storage drive. . I have a 256gb USB drive. Mint is incredibly small so I have a ton of extra room on the drive. How can I use the rest of that drive as payment storage?:

[mikaelrask]

hey and welcome to the forum and linux mint, i hope your not connected to the internet with that windows xp, windows xp support died like 10-15 years ago. the live environment is only to be use to see if everything works out of the box. nothing is saved in the live environment. If there is nothing you need to save on that laptop, go through the installation and install linux mint on it. you can install it on to the usb but the speed will not be great, and the usb as a payed storage, you have to make a network share on it, that people can connect to. but would not recommend it. better setup a server to use for that end.

[linux-rox]

I have a old pos PC that runs windows XP.

Have you confirmed Mint will run? Depending on the hardware, might not.

I have a 256gb USB drive. Mint is incredibly small so I have a ton of extra room on the drive. How can I use the rest of that drive as payment storage?:

What app are you planning to use to set up persistence? Universal USB Installer will leave the rest of the drive free, so you can put another partition there. As I recall, something similar can be done with Rufus, but it's been a while so not sure I recall correctly nor how to do it.

Another thing you could do is install Mint outright to the USB drive. In BIOS that's pretty simple. Just point the installer at the target and let 'er rip. Be aware, this requires two USB drives: a small one (4 GB will be plenty) to run the installer and your large one to hold the installed system.