Is there a recovery mode for mountain lion?
(Mountain Lion’s OS X Recovery feature, known as Lion Recovery prior to Mountain Lion’s release, is a big help here, but not all Macs get it—and if your Mac’s drive is itself having trouble, recovery mode may not even be available. Also, if you need to reinstall Mountain Lion, recovery mode requires you to download the entire 4GB+ installer again.)
What kind of installer do I need for mountain lion?
It turns out that when you download the Mountain Lion installer from the Mac App Store, that copy of the installer installs whatever version of OS X was available at the time of download. For example, if you downloaded OS X 10.8 the day Mountain Lion is released, you downloaded the 10.8. 0 installer.
Where do I find the bootable drive for mountain lion?
Connect to your Mac the properly formatted hard drive or flash drive you want to use for your bootable Mountain Lion installer. In Disk Utility, find this destination drive in the left-hand sidebar and then drag it into the Destination field on the right.
Is the OS X Mountain Lion on a disc?
Like Lion (OS X 10.7) before it, Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) doesn’t ship on a disc—it’s available only as an installer app downloadable from the Mac App Store, and that installer doesn’t require a bootable installation disc.
Is there a way to reinstall mountain lion on a Mac?
This will boot the Mac to its firmware. When the work screen appears, you first need to make sure the drive is completely wiped clean, or it may try to install Mountain Lion, which is what the hidden Recovery partition should be.
Why do I need a bootable install drive for mountain lion?
For example, if you want to install Mountain Lion on multiple Macs, a bootable install drive can be more convenient than downloading or copying the entire Mountain Lion installer to each computer. Also, if your Mac is experiencing problems, a bootable install drive makes a handy emergency disk.
Why is there no disk when trying to install Lion?
From what you describe it sounds like you are trying to install Lion on your newly installed HDD replacement but its not showing as a disk when you try to actually install Mac OS X. That indicates to me that the drive has not yet been formatted as Mac OS Extended Journaled, so it is not ready for Lion to install onto it.