Thank you for your time and patience in replying.
I used Balena Etcher on one of my laptops, a Thinkpad X240 to burn the usb, using Linux Mint XFCE as the operating system. You've really staggered me by suggesting the very old fashioned concept of burning a cd, but if that's what it takes to test this distribution...... I'm sure that somewhere in the Linux storage there is an external dvd writer somewhere; however on second thought my Thinkpad T430 still has it's dvd writer, so I could always load up a live disk environment (Ubuntu, Mint or similar) and burn a cd. Now where were those old blank cd's???
Thanks again for the help, I really appreciate it.