Is the wheezy 2.7 build broken?

Well, that would certainly make a huge difference! No boot loader being written would absolutely make a dead disk. Although I spend a moderate time in Linux, I do almost nothing with disks and zero with USB sticks. Everything is virtualized for me.

To that end, I'm not so sure that I would call it clear. Only a dmesg reference and a sde are provided with no indication that the integer afterwards represents a partition. In my case I was using df to find my disk which worked fine, but obviously added the partition (learned something new today). I can easily see how a neophyte to Linux could make that same mistake.

I haven't discounted a hardware failure in the Asus MB target. There certainly could be something wrong there, I agree. My concern has been that I couldn't get much of anything else to work on any other machine either, however. If the correction to the the dd command starts moving things along then that will hopefully shed some light on the viability of the target MB.

As for the image... MD5 doesn't lie and if you got it to boot then that is good enough for me. And, frankly, at this point, one DVD booted on one machine, so that says something too. My assumption has always been primarily that the problem was likely between the chair and the keyboard (me doing something stupid). The dd device integer fits perfectly into that.

Success! And, with the 16GB stick to boot!

Something may still be a little strange because it booted into the stick once and then I had some problems replicating that. But nothing happens once by accident so I kept fiddling and eventually was able to boot into the USB stick and then install from that to the motherboard. So, at this point I have a new installation. It is presently updating although that might have been a mistake. In the installation page there is a warning about upgrades that indicates it is OK to accept these but to not take OS upgrades. I am not familiar enough with Debian to know how the different types of upgrades differ in presentation to the user. So, I may have to reload all over again. Right now there were some 700+ upgrades that were requested.

Anyhow.... A big shout out of thanks to you for helping. I greatly appreciate it.

Best regards,
Alan