Nothing you've described is wrong, and disabling fast startup and BitLocker was the right preparation. The usual cause of a slow "Copying files" stage is the installer downloading updates or third-party software at the same time, which you can avoid by unticking those options on the installation screen (or disconnecting from the network) and running the Update Manager once Mint is installed. The next suspects are a slow USB stick or a USB 2.0 port, so use a blue USB 3 port if you have one and check the ISO's checksum, and a mechanical hard disk rather than an SSD, where installs of 30 minutes or more are normal. I'd let it finish rather than cancel mid-install, since interrupting partitioning can leave a messy disk layout, but if it makes no progress at all for 10 minutes or so, restart the installer with those options off and try again.
Yeah so short story long or whatever the quote is, my install failed after a very long time because it decided to download mint on my Ventoy USB instead of my drive
Disabling fast startup is standard advice for dual-booting, because otherwise Windows leaves its filesystem in a hibernated state that Linux shouldn't touch. BitLocker is more optional if you shrink the partition from within Windows first, but decrypting beforehand is the safer route, since the installer can't resize encrypted partitions and bootloader changes can trigger recovery-key prompts.
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u/Slate_Canopy 2h ago
Nothing you've described is wrong, and disabling fast startup and BitLocker was the right preparation. The usual cause of a slow "Copying files" stage is the installer downloading updates or third-party software at the same time, which you can avoid by unticking those options on the installation screen (or disconnecting from the network) and running the Update Manager once Mint is installed. The next suspects are a slow USB stick or a USB 2.0 port, so use a blue USB 3 port if you have one and check the ISO's checksum, and a mechanical hard disk rather than an SSD, where installs of 30 minutes or more are normal. I'd let it finish rather than cancel mid-install, since interrupting partitioning can leave a messy disk layout, but if it makes no progress at all for 10 minutes or so, restart the installer with those options off and try again.