Wrong md5sum leading to failed installation?

Thanks for the suggestions, will try win32diskimager when I get the new stick.

In the meanwhile I've tried to use the virtual machine, thats a great idea! Should eliminate any chance of the stick being bad. I've seen other forum posts here where a faulty hardware device worked on ubuntu install but not debian, which is why I initially suspect the stick to be bad.

In another forum post (i found out about the search functionality, albeit a bit late) I read that zsync does not take HTTPS, only HTTP, so when trying that I managed to also download the correct ISO version.

I also saw Balena Etcher coming along, might try it too if I don't have any results.

Will revert back once I have results on the VM / new hardware / new ISO / win32diskimager.

Thanks for the tip on Ventoy, I just read their main page, looks very interesting!

 

Hi all just wanted to give a quick followup:
I used KVM + virt-manager to try the ISO I downloaded, and it worked! I could install without problems this time to the virtual machine, further strengthening the hypothesis of the bad USB. At the same time my new usb drive arrived. Followed the same steps as before, I now managed to complete the full installation.

Summary: Even though the USB stick was able to upload Ubuntu 20.04 to a machine (and still is), it didn't manage to do Debian 12. Switching to a new usb stick solved the problem.

Many thanks for the replies. The next step in my journey will be obtaining an appropriate ethercat servo driver

Balena etcher is multiplatform and the only one I use. The ISO's were tested with it when they were built.
Win32DiskImager has never worked for me for years.
Rufus needs to download stuff of the internet whwn it runs which is disconcerting...