Recovery File For Mountain Lion

When you install Mountain Lion, or when it is installed on a new machine by Apple, a Recovery Hard Drive is created on the startup drive, actually it is a hidden partition on the internal storage. The user does not need to deliberately create the Recovery HD...it is there.

The Recovery HD does not appear in Disk Utility. To see it, restart your computer and hold down the Option key and you will get a grey screen showing the macintosh hard drive and recovery hard drive, and any additional partitions you might have created.

Just click the macintosh hd to continue the normal boot process.

Apple started that with Lion, recovery is via the hard drive instead of an install disk...only catch is that you must have an internet connection because the recovery HD is a bare-bones startup that then goes to the Apple servers to reinstall Mac OS X if that is what you want to do. Other utilities, however, are resident in the recovery HD so thngs like disk repair that you used to have to rely on the install disk to use on the startup volume, you can now use from the Recovery HD.

All that you do is restart your Mac and hold the Command and R keys to boot to the recovery HD, then choose what you want to do from the options window that appears. Disk Utiility is there so you can repair permissions, repair hard drive, and so on.