Partition question from clean install

I've got a question about the partitions Windows 7 creates when installing (I presume Windows 7 creates them). I'm using the RC build 7100. I got a new hard drive, formatted it, then went to install Win7. I deleted all existing partitions and then told Win7 to install on the blank hard drive. I've had Windows 7 installed for a while but recently I wanted to dual-boot with another OS. When I went to do that, I noticed there are three partitions on my one hard drive.

The first partition, sda1-1, is not really a partition, just free space of 0.97MB (starting at .03MB and ending at 1.0MB on the disk). The second partition, sda1, has a label of "System Reserved" and is 100MB (an ntfs partition). This is also the active, boot partition. The final partition, and the only one I thought was on the drive, sda2, is 465.66GB.

So, does Windows 7 make a boot partition in addition to the main install? I'd need to edit that if I'm going to dual-boot and I'd just never noticed that Windows does this. Did Windows XP make a separate boot partition as well? Have I just never noticed this?

Thanks for the reply...but actually it's a bit more complex than that. I was wanting to install a linux distribution, so I was going to need to create three partitions for that (boot, swap, ext/reiserfs). I was thinking, remembering how WinXP was set up, that there would only be one partition. I never played around with Vista long enough to notice its partitioning on a clean install. I knew I didn't have a recovery partition on this drive, so that's why I was surprised to see three existing partitions. I'm sure the first is just extra space, the second is apparently the boot partition but the problem with that is it's ntfs and I need a fat32 boot partition for the linux distro. If I assume that the first is actually free space (I'm about 100% that's the case) I'd still need to combine or eliminate that second partition, which I wasn't expecting.

There is a way to do what I'm wanting (referenced here: http://forums.remote-exploit.org/b [...] orial.html ), but I was hoping to avoid the 4 partition limit without having to create a bunch of primary and logical partitions as these instructions did. Installing Win7 and linux on a dual-boot system is complex enough without having to make 7 or so partitions, but that seems like what's going to happen.