initramfs prompt

Post date: 2018-01-18 14:42:52

I think my usb operating system is having trouble mounting. Please help me fix it. Note: I don't know what I'm doing, so use small words please.

Background:

Hi! I'm in Nicaragua with a semi-functional computer. My 1.8" hard drive died while I was traveling, and those are hard to find, generally speaking. I might be able to get one eventually, but that's not the question at hand.

Right now, I have an install USB stick with Linux Mint 18.2 on it. I used that to install onto a physically small usb stick. So far so good. Then I updated to 18.3 and told it to do all the updates. Now when I go to load the installed version, it gets stuck at a prompt that says "initramfs." how do I get it to actually load instead of getting stuck at this prompt?

I'd really like to not have to wipe it and start all over again because that would be my third try (first time I tried installing to an SD card, which is apparently not a thing. Second time, my partner broke it in terminal somehow) and each try takes like a day, and since I obviously don't know what I'm doing, there's no guarantee that try #4 would be any different from this try. I'm hoping someone can walk me through some steps to fix this. But if there's some reason to think that the fourth time's a charm, I'm all ears.

I have read this and it is effectively gibberish to me.

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