Originally Posted by
Discorde
... I’m worried I’ll destroy everything on the Lenovo...
You would have to try
extremely hard to destroy anything on your machine simply by booting into a 'live' Linux image. Having booted into that image you can only overwrite the existing disk contents if you actually ask to install Linux - and then only after going through a series of questions (about keyboards, country etc), or if you deliberately use the file browser to select a file on your disk and delete it. IOW the live image is pretty benign and is designed to allow you to freely check out your machine using Linux without actually altering anything.
As others have said here it's [in my view] definitely worth persevering, and once you have it running I expect you'll realise (a) how simple it really was (b) how good it is
Without wishing to repeat too much what others have said I expect that if the machine is not booting into Mint it is either:
(i) The USB drive boot image wasn't created properly. I use Linux to create these but there are instructions
here for M$ and Mac in case you wanted to check out what you've done.
(ii) You've not yet found the magic incantation to select the USB drive for boot. Unfortunately there's no universal key here, some machines use del, F2, F8, but (without knowing the specific model of your machine) Lenovo seem to use F12. So, when you first turn on the machine begin tapping the F12 key reasonably quickly and regularly, hopefully a screen will pop up asking which drive to use as boot - select the USB drive and go from there.
If that doesn't work, let us know what your machine model is and we can probably confirm what the boot selection key is. Remember that nothing described above is permanent or would destroy anything extant on the machine.
FP.