Good distro with ddrutility

[Shahrukh Merchant]

I've been using ddrescue with System Rescue CD for some years, and while 
I've been satisfied so far, I would like to install the ddrutility package.

I created a System Rescue CD Live USB with persistence so I could use 
the backing store with overlayfs to be able to customize the USB to some 
extent.

Much to my disappointment, not only is ddrutility not in the System 
Rescue CD package, but nor is pacman (Arch Linux's package installer) 
nor apt-get or apt or yum or whatever other package installers are out 
there. Not even make, not even gcc. So I can't install it myself either.

So my question is--what is an alternative Live USB installation that has 
the following features?

1. Includes ddrescue (of course) and related utilities like parted, 
ntfs-3g, losetup and other stuff that would be good to have in a rescue 
environment?

2. Includes the ddrutility package, ideally, or at least has the ability 
to install it (and possibly other packages too) in a persistent way.

3. Networking and graphical support would be nice, so it can serve as a 
general basic Unix environment as well even outside of "rescue" functions.

System Rescue CD is unfortunately missing Item 2 in the list above.

Shahrukh