Making LFS safe from SuSE?

I'm wanting to learn Linux internals better. As such I'm going to build Linux From Scratch (LFS). However, I'm not sure how to best approach this. LFS must be built from an existing distro. I want to maintain my desktop SuSE 8.1 install as pristine possibly. So naturally I'm a little concerned about installing all the devel packages, doing all the compiling, etc. So I was wondering what eveyone thought of this. Would I be best off creating ANOTHER partition with a SuSE (or other distro) install that I didn't mind breaking if need be? Thoughts on this. Preston