Problems installing OSX Lion - new Mac Mini 2011

Hi!
I'm having major problem with my brand new Mac Mini.
I wanted to upgrade it right away after reading so many succeful upgrading reports on various forums so I bought a 120GB Intel 320 SSD disk and 2x4 GB of Kingston 1333mhz ram. I swapped the drives right away and idiotically used to original drive in a case to create an external installation USB-drive (my 4GB USB drives didn't work).
I then created a bootable USB-disk with the external original drive and tried to install but only get the circle with slash after selecting the drive in the "options" menu. If I remove the USB-drive I get a flashing folder icon. If start holding down Command + S I get a message saying that the "version of OSX is not supported on this platform".
I also tried using the Recovery Assistant HD to create a bootable recovery tool but that gives the same results.
In short:
I can't install OSX Lion on a brand new Mac Mini with upgraded HD and Ram. I don't have the original installation anymore.
Am I out of luck?

Internet Recovery solved this problem. Option+Command+R.

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Yesterday my new Mac Mini (Core i7 2,7 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD6630M 256 MB) arrived. It replaces my old Mac Mini (Core Duo 1,83 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, Intel GMA950 64 MB). One day I'll replace the 500 GB 5400 RPM HDD in this Mini by an Intel SSD drive (just like I did with my previous Mini). I'll do a fully clean install then (formatting the SSD drive in Disk Utility and then installing Lion on it from a bootable USB thumb drive). The only problem is I can't seem to download Lion for free from the Mac AppStore (MAS) although I have bought a new Mac Mini which came with Lion pre-installed. I know how to create a bootable USB thumb drive with Lion on it when you download it from the MAS. But that's the problem... I can't seem to download Lion from the MAS for free. When I open the MAS while holding down the Option key I can download Lion but it will charge me for it. Is there any way I can download Lion from the MAS without paying for it? Since it already came with my new Mac Mini 2011 this should be possible I guess?
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After doing some research, it seems that there are only 2 WAYS to do a complete reinstall of Lion on the Mac Mini 2011 without paying for the Lion download in the Mac AppStore (i.e. recreating every partition, also the Recovery HD partition, from scratch e.g. when installing Lion on a clean HDD/SSD).
1) COMPLETELY clone the Mac Mini 2011 HDD including all of its partitions to an external drive and restore it when you want to do a complete reinstall.
2) Use the LION INTERNET RECOVERY feature built-in into new Macs that ship with Lion (this feature is present in new Macs starting from the Mac Mini 2011 and Macbook Air 2011).
OS X Lion: About Lion Recovery
Lion Internet Recovery
If you happen to encounter a situation in which you cannot start from the Recovery HD, such as your hard drive stopped responding or you installed a new hard drive without Mac OS X installed, new Mac models introduced after public availability of OS X Lion automatically use the Lion Internet Recovery feature if the Recovery HD (Command-R method above) doesn't work. Lion Internet Recovery lets you start your Mac directly from Apple's Servers. The system runs a quick test of your memory and hard drive to ensure there are no hardware issues.
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Source: Lion Recovery
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