Installing Windows 7 in a dual-boot environment

It has been a while, but recently I have been playing around with my windows install once again (after almost 1.5 years of happy coexistance). The decision to redo windows was made after I acquired a Win 7 Ultimate key. I am hoping to resolve some speed issues with certain games, finally make my wifi USB stick work and so on.
So after inserting the disc and booting from it, I was not really expecting any problems, since it was a straight forward thing: kill the old partition – reformat – install. Or so I thought. Turns out, the Win 7 installer is to limited to give me any options on how to format a partition, or tell me that I should actually use two partitions as best practice. Yes, indeed, Microsoft now wants to have a 100-200 MB Partition for whatever sort of recovery shit. On top of that, Win 7 has issues when multiple HDDs are used with multiple partitions. Even the BIOS boot order AND/OR the SATA port to which the drives are connected can make installation impossible.
Here is my solution. I booted into a real OS (Ubuntu), opened GParted and used some unallocated space to make a 200MB recovery partition plus a some 200GB main install partition. Booted of the Win 7 disc and voila – it works. Dunno why, before the installer would just tell me it hadn’t found a “system partition” – whatever that may be. So no the installer is happily humming away and I enjoy staring at the somewhat lame percentage figure that slowly approaches 100% – previous Windows installers had cool graphics and time estimates that never were accuracte – could be called a regression I think?