I spent a good deal of the afternoon diving in where no sane person really wants to spend a lot of time -- in my Lion recovery partition. It's not hard to get there, and it's quite a curious place when you do.
The Recovery volume is a small slice of your hard drive that gets partitioned off during your Lion install; it's not optional, because that's actually where the OS gets installed from. You can view the contents of the Recovery volume by mounting it with the command-line diskutil tool, as John Siracusa points out; the regular Disk Utility app is thoughtful enough to keep it hidden.
To restart in recovery, reboot your computer and hold down Comm
