No Recovery - Mountain Lion won't install but Lion Recovery worked (until Mountain Lion messed it up).

When I tried to install Mountain Lion it gave me the "this disk does not support some features, like FileVault or Recovery Mode..." message. However, my Lion install at that point had a working Recovery Partition (I confirmed it after I got this first message - booted with it). I also have a cloned backup so I clicked continue. The install failed and gave the "No Recovery" message. Then I tried to boot in Recovery Mode and a screen came up saying "Installing" and the giant X with what looked like a progress bar with diagonal blue lines moving left to right, but no "time remaining" or other info indicating it was doing anything. I let this go on for about 10 or 15 minutes then restarted my computer. In Disk Utility I repaired permissions and disk repair was ok. I'm not using RAID or BootCamp - just one partition (plus the Lion Recovery one. The Mac is a newest model MacMini with an OWC SSD (I first thought the SSD might be the problem but it worked with Lion, so...)