Please can someone give me a walk through of how to remove everything from a knoppix install ?!?

I want to get to a point of it being just a base debian + whatever Knoppix needs to ge to that point..

No X, No apps etc..
Only hardware detection and drivers etc...

I have tried for a while to remove packages..
( I can get into my chrooted knoppix root dir and start apt-get'ing arround...)
but I eventualy get into problems with failed dependencies etc.. ..
and I have no I dea how to continue..
I tried using a kick list and removing just those packages but even they didnt all remove... some of them remained because of errors..

please can you help me..

thanks