Early on after Leopard was released, I followed this tip on how to make a small partition on my Time Machine (TM) drive and clone a copy of my install DVD to it. The point here was to have faster access to the restore feature of TM, without the need to locate and boot from your install DVD. This worked well, but I've since discovered an even simpler method which does not necessitate the need to partition the TM drive.
Starting with a clean, newly-formatted TM drive, use Disk Utility and do a restore (source: Install DVD; Destination: TM drive). Once the restore has completed, you'll have a bootable TM drive which can be selected on startup by pressing and holding the Option key down. All that's left is to go into TM's preferences and select this drive for your TM backups.
Simple, quick, and works like a charm, without the need to partition the drive.

