I am thinking about having a crack at this, but don't want to muck up a PC doing it. If i install a distro (advice on which one would be appreciated) as a starting point in a Virtual Machine, and the build a LFS in the same machine, will it actually work?!

Okay, yesterday I started my first VMWare-LFS.

Here are my experiences:

Im using a "normal" PC with Windows XP and downloaded the VMWare-Player.

At my first try I used the vmwarez-livecd-player and the LFS-6.2 LiveCD.
Really very soon I noticed that the vmwarez-livecd-player only ships with a 2GB virtual harddisk, which is - hmmm.... let's say "small".

So I asked how to get an empty vm with even a bigger drive. Yesterday I found "easyvmx.com", where you can build empty virtual machines online. I have chosen my options containing 100GB of virtual drive.

I wanted to start with the LFS LiveCD, but had no CDR for burning the image (bad on sundays). But this it's no problem, just copy the iso-file on to your computer and edit the vmx-file this way:

Find your entry for your CD-Rom drive, which may look like this:
# Settings for physical CDROM drive
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"
ide1:0.startConnected = "TRUE"
ide1:0.fileName = "F:"

Change them looking like this:
# Settings for physical CDROM drive
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
#ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"
ide1:0.startConnected = "TRUE"
#ide1:0.fileName = "F:"
ide1:0.fileName = "C:\Documents\LFS\lfslivecd-x86-6.2-5.iso"

Just comment out the originals, after building your LFS you may change them back for easy attaching your physical CD-Rom when you don't need the livecd anymore.

This way is really nice, and you have even not to leave a cd in your tray all the time while building lfs.

Okay, Now let's boot our virtual machine. It should work really fine (it worked wothout any problems on my system) and soon you will see your boot prompt.

I've just startet to install my LFS while reading the book online at my windows, and I hope to bring it to an end today or tommorrow.

Here are some hints, which got the vm working "better" with my machine:
Put your LFS VM files on an empty spare disk if possible. Leaving them on the windows system drive may get your system really slow - at least when you are compilen gcc and other big packages. My vm is really fast, and you will notice a litte performance decrease on the host system only while compiling the bigger packages.

When setting up your virtual harddrives using fdisk, do not write a bootable flag for your future boot-disk. When shutting down the vm for any purposes it will not boot the livecd if you do so. If you have set the boot-flog for your virtual drive, enter the BIOS when booting again your vm and set it up to boot from cd-rom first to workaround this problem.

I have encountered a little problem, not really knowing why it is so. I suspended my vm session one time while going to lunch. After restoring the session (it's a nice feature I think - you don't need to setup your working environment all the time) at first everything worked fine, until I needed to apply a patch to a package. The patch command didn't work complaining the loopback device loop0 produces IO-errors. Not knowing how and why (it may even have nothing to do with the suspendend vm-session) I just rebooted the vm and everything was fine again.

At my oppinion this is a nice way to build a LFS system while you can keep on using your windows computer as usual.

I hope I could help a bit.

Yeh, that is helpfull thanks. So you'd reccommend the LFS Live CD as your starting Distro. Cheers.

Sorry... urgs...
Long post, short answer: Yes, LFS LiveCD is my choice for building LFS.

For my oppinion LFS LiveCD is the best choice, because it comes configured in all ways needed by the LFS-build (expect -c "spawn ls" will work, etc.) and additionaly contains every package and patch needed in the directory "/lfs-sources", so you don't need to download anything else.

great - thanks for your advice - just downloading the Live CD torrent now. Will no doubt be back on here posting if I get stuck! Will feedback how I get on though.