New Mac Mini - How do i reinstall my copy of Mountain LIon from App Store?

Hi All:
I just bought a new Mac Mini running Mountain Lion. I want to clone an older system drive that had been running Snow Leopard onto my new Mini and then upgrade to Mountain Lion (I tried Migration Assistant first, but it didn't work correctly and I don't want to mess with it again).
My question: once I have a working Snow Leopard install on my Mini, is it possible to upgrade back to the Mountain Lion OS it came with without paying for a new copy? How do I do that?
Thanks!

It isn't just the hard drive - there is firmware built in that will prevent you from booting wih Snow Leopard. If you do a search here, you'll find many threads trying to install an earlier OS than what the machine came with all with the same answer (unless the Mac was built right around the time of a new OS being introduced, then it is possible to be booted from both OS's). In this case, you'd be trying to go backwards by 2 versions. Also see here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2186?viewlocale=en_US
And yes, if you use internet recovery and first erase the drive (available in Disk Utility within the recovery partition) and then reinstall the OS, it'll reinstall the OS on a blank drive and you can start over. If the machine is new, then Command + R during restart should automatically boot into internet recovery (connecting you to Apple's servers by showing a spinning globe while connecting); if the machine is a bit older, then Command + Option + R will boot into internet recovery.

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  • How to properly make a copy of Mountain Lion on a USB flash drive?

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