I have a three-or-four year-old laptop on which I am replacingg the hard drive. It
seems to be old enough not to have proper virtualisatoin hardware. It currently
dual-boots Debian testing, and, once in a blue moon, Windows XP.

(So far the main problems I have had is to copy Windows' three partitions -- the one
that runs, the so-called restore partition, and the EFI partition. I'm hoping that
grub will find a way to make the running partition bootable. I managed to get
clonezilla to copy the three partitions (even though the EFI partition seemed to
violate what I know of the EFI specs in that it didn't have a FAT 12, 16, or 32
filesystem. Maybe grub will be able to figure out how to boot what needs booting.)

But maybe this is the ideal time to try the iso on the new drive and try it on real
hardware instead of a virtual machine. If things were to go
massively wrong, I could always put the old disk back in.

Except I need instructions just how to do this. It does not have a CD or DVD drive,
but will boot from USB stick.

How do I go about putting the installation .iso onto a USB stick so it will boot?
Debian should be good enough to accomplish that, riight?

Or is there another installation method it might be more useful to test?

-- hendrik