Richard Owlett wrote: > I wish to do an _*EXTREMELY*_ minimalist install of Debian to a USB > flash drive (aka /dev/sdb1) assuming use as a MBR device.
if you just want to boot in your system, then you take only the boot directory - this is the simplest way and less consuming space. I used such approach with very old 256MB SD card to boot raspberry that runs fon NFS root. if you want some minimal rescue disk debootstrap would work or some kind of minimalistic distro - as grub is almost everywhere the same. I checked SLAX recently - just dd the iso to usb and done. total size of distro was about 360MB including GUI I hope this helps regards