David wrote:
I forgot to mention that an alternative approach could be to serve the dvd or mounted iso file contents from another machine on your LAN rather than from a flash drive.
No LAN exists.In answer to related questions, others have unsuccessfully suggested virtual machines.
Installers usually have some way to do this but I have forgotten the specifics (maybe I even did that on Fedora not Debian, I forget). You can research it. You might need a http server (like lighttpd) if that's the only protocol the installer understands, loop mount the iso file (faster than serving from the dvd) and serve it over http.