Mountain Lion installation failed, cannot repair HD, cannot pick a destination for Time Machine backup

It seems I am not alone in the failure of installing Mountain Lion. I am using a mid 2010 MacBook Pro, had Lion installed, tried upgrading to Mountain Lion. Like so many others I am getting errors, can't repair disk, etc. I do have Time Machine backups, and can go select the most recent one, but when I get to the screen to select a destination, there is nothing to select.
What are my options for restoring to my last good backup? My Lion OS was also from the app store. I believe I had either Leopard or Snow Leopard when I first bought my MBP, but not 100% sure. I am just extremely frustrated and while I know I have been doing backups to the Time Capsule, if I can't get one of those to restore, will I be able to get to the files it backed up if I have to completely erase and start over with a lower OS?

At some point I was finally able to get the recovery from the Disk Utility menu, once I threw in an older OSX DVD (Snow Leopard.) Once I could get to my files, I copied just the folders/files I wanted from my HD to an external drive, then went back in through Disk Utility, erased everything and when I went to reload, it did an online recovery and actually grabbed my copy of Mountain Lion and installed it without a hitch. I figured it was going to reload the older OS but apparently since I had already purchased Mountain Lion, the online recovery retrieved that from the cloud?? Anyway, once that installed and I added back on what I wanted, it's like I have a new MacBook. No other issues once I installed. I did have to get an update for one of my programs, Final Draft, but so far everything else is running. Seems the erase and clean install was the best way to go. Thanks!

Similar Messages

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    John Seal wrote:
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