e: just saw your edits, you don’t need to do any of this, you can just look at your journal with ‘sudo journalctl’ from a terminal (or whatever GUI app Mint ships with)

Did the install complete and then you rebooted and it failed?

This is progress! Presumably, when your system tried to boot it would be writing information to a log that we can read. With your fancy new sysrescuecd, you can boot into a live environment and read that log.

We’ll need to use the sysrescuecd live environment to mount your hard drive and read the log.

Start sysrescuecd, startx, and open a terminal.

Make a directory

mkdir mint-root

Find the device for your system’s root partition. Run

lsblk

You’ll see a list of things like sda, sdb, nvme0n1. If you’re using a M.2 drive it’ll probably be nvme0n1. Under that it will list the partitions (ex. nvme0n1p1). Your system partition should be the largest one but I don’t know Mint’s default partition layout. If there are multiple we can check them all, so just choose the most likely one.

Once you’ve found the right device you can mount it to the folder you created (you’re already root, you don’t need sudo):

mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 mint-root

Now if you look in that directory (ls mint-root), you should see a bunch of directories like /bin, /dev, /sys, /usr, /var. If so, this is your system drive. If not and you see a directory named after the user your created when you installed mint, go back and choose the other partition, this is just a home partition.

Assuming you have your system partition, now you can look at the logs:

journalctl --directory=mint-root/var/log/journal

This viewer uses vim-like controls, so j to go down and k to go up. Page Up and Page Down should also work (probably mouse scrolling too if you’re in a GUI terminal).

The thing that caused the problem should be in the last few lines.