Comment 1 for bug 724383

I believe the command should be

# zcat boot.img.gz > /dev/sdX

instead of

# zcat boot.img.gz > /dev/sdX1

So just remove the "1" from the end. This is what solved my problems with booting from the USB stick, and this is also what the corresponding Debian documentation says: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch04s03.html.en