I'm in need of a tiny distribution to work as a restoration system via a few scripts. All I need it to do is to support cpufreq (to avoid overheating on laptops), mount a ntfs filesystem read-write, and do a simple dd operation.

I've been using the Debian netinst installed by itself (plus cpufreq and ntfs-3g debs), which works but takes a few hundred megabytes, and I can't help thinking there's got to be a more efficient way.

I know of tiny distros like Puppy or MicroCore, but they all run from a RAM-loaded filesystem which complicates things. I'd rather it ran normally.

What do you suggest?

You could try installing Debian with debootstrap using the --variant=minbase option. This will get you the absolute minimum packages to get a base install running without circumventing the package manager. If you don't need the newest packages, using an older release might get you a smaller base install. Also you could tweak the filesystem to use a 1024 block-size instead of the default 4096. And a 32-bit install also might be smaller than a 64-bit install.

If I recall correctly, a 32-bit minbase install of Wheezy on ext4 with a 1024 block-size for me was just over 100MiB.

Follow the directions to create a bootable Arch install, if you are comfortable using a different package manager. Arch installs start out very small and grow depending on what you want to add.

How can ram loaded distro's make things difficult? In reality all distro's run in ram to some extent. They just create an entire ramdrive. Pretty sure you can limit some of them with boot options.

If networked I guess you could use pxe/gpxe/ipxe.

Sounds like all you need is a live "Knoppix cd" or "SystemRescue CD"

Could master your own text based iso. Might look at www.SuseStudio.com and create what you want. Its the way I make quick and fast Suse and OpenSuse builds. Fedora has a way too as well as knoppix and Gentoo and even LFS.

Could look at the G4U iso/floppy's. It's pretty basic. Could add in or master a version for yourself. It's netbsd based.

Puppy, slitaz, slax, dsl and such are pretty small, if you can do without that maybe see about putting Tom's boot on a cd or pxe it. Tom's is unmaintained but still one of the most linux on a floppy.