An apparent issue with permissions on the recovery partition of recent Macs -- those that shipped with Mountain Lion pre-installed -- can make it very difficult to reinstall Mountain Lion in the case of system corruption on the boot drive. The problem even affects trying to restore Mountain Lion from a Time Machine backup, and falsely reports that the Mac in question "isn't compatible with Mountain Lion." Thanks to a support forum thread on Apple's website, a workaround has been found: repairing permissions on the recovery partition.
