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I need to be able to run a linux distribution on my Windows 10 laptop, so I decided to go with Debian.

I want to have a USB flash drive that I own run Debian on my laptop, instead of having my laptop do so on its own. I have tried multiple times to make the flash drive bootable using the instructions from the Debian website, as well as from some troubleshooting threads here and YouTube.

I have downloaded CD/DVD images with BitTorrent, and used rufus to write these images onto the USB. One red flag that I see is that whenever I try to give the flash drive a name in rufus, the flash drive's name becomes "Install Debian GNU/Linux" instead. I try to go with the flow and open setup.exe on the flash drive, but that just installs Debian onto my computer. Furthermore, I cannot get the Debian version that gets installed onto my computer to complete its installation anyway. When I restart the computer and select the option to continue with the Debian installations process, I just get a message telling me that windows failed to load.

There are several options what you could do for your original question:

1. Install a virtual machine on Windows (for example, Virtual Box),
   and install Debian there - this is the safest setup, since virtual
   machine isolates the system inside it. This is good for beginners.


2. Make a Live USB or Live CD/DVD with Debian and boot from it.


3. Make a dual-boot system (maybe risky if you are not careful)


4. Erase Windows, and install Debian instead of it.

If you want options 3 or 4, you need to write the installer on USB. Once it is done, change the boot order in BIOS/UEFI, and boot from USB. The option 4 is the easiest - you can follow the installer. The option 3 or some customization is more difficult - you need to prepare disk partitions (and resize filesystems, then partitions if needed), and manually make label partitions, where you want to install, make sure that GRUB2 finds Windows loader, etc.

From what you are describing, the Windows loader is lost. What exactly do you see? Do you see a blue GRUB loader with booting options of different systems? You could damage the filesystem, so the data could be lost.

An option to see the damage is to load the system from Live USB (if you cannot boot into Debian system on your laptop), and investigate whether the filesystems on disk are damaged. In particular, Kali Linux makes high-quality USB images, which are easy to use: https://www.kali.org/downloads/.