Mountain lion won't install after drive wipe

Good morning.
I recently was handed down a 2008 13" macbook (unibody)
But my friend forgot to take all his information off the computer so he told me how to make a
Recovery USB drive and wipe and re-install mountain lion.
Everything goes great with the wipe and creation of the new partition so I move forward to
Reinstall OS X I go through the EULA then it asks me for my Apple ID that the mountain license is
Associated with and proceeds to download the os.
It takes about 40 min and it says it will reboot.
Problem is it hits 100% downloaded stays there a few moments
Then restarts back to the recovery options screen. Thus not continuing
The install.
How do I fix this and get mountain lion back on my macbook.
Thanks

spritzdog wrote:
When I go to Disk Utility, that option is not available, it is greyed out?
Did you select the partition (indented, under the main line for the drive)?
The sample is on an external, but should be the same on your internal.  If not, please either post a screenshot of yours, or note what's different.
I don't want to reformat the drive and loose everything?  What can I do?
Does that mean you don't have backups?   If not, that's risky.  Hard drives fail, things go wrong, people delete things in error. 

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