Mountain Lion wont install on macbook. "This disk cannot be used to start up your computer"

Basically, when I try to install the mountain lion update onto my Snow Leapard OS, I get the above message. Something must be wrong with my hd configuration.

I think the problem was caused when I tried to install linux on a partition before this and failed miserably time after time; I think the problem was that reFIT wasn't recognizing the proper partitions to boot into. Anyway, I also noticed that even after deleting the defunct linux partitions using Disk Utility, the linux drives still showed up in the reFit startup menu. Did I screw up my HD? Is that what is preventing me from installing Mountain Lion? If so, how can I fix it?

Thanks.