Does the third command really work as intended?<p><pre><code>    sudo cat ubuntu-14.04-desktop-amd64.dmg &gt;&gt; &#x2F;dev&#x2F;sda1
</code></pre>
I believe this will attempt to write data after the of the the block device, which almost by defintion will fail.<p>However, I often do the following, which works pretty well:<p><pre><code>    sudo cat ubuntu-14.04-desktop-amd64.dmg &gt; &#x2F;dev&#x2F;sda1</code></pre>