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I have recently switched to a Mac mini 6.2 (2.6GHz quad core i7) with a 1TB Fusion drive, and so far I have been very pleased. The Fusion drive really does good things to disk I/O performance. I have encountered the expected minor annoyances transferring from one Mac to another (a new one is having to enter my Apple ID password the first time I launch an App Store app). Thanks to a post here I remembered to uninstall the Adobe apps before launching them on the new machine and to de-authorize the old computer in iTunes this avoiding those annoyances. All has gone well until today when I ran into one that has me completely bumfuzzled.

I have an external firewire drive I have used for years with OS X 10.8.2 currently installed on it that I boot from when I want to run Drive Genius, TechTool Pro, or some other utility against my regular boot drive. When I tried to boot from this drive things got cockeyed…

1. The boot attempts fail with a grey Do Not Access crossed circle in the center of an otherwise blank white screen.
2. Thinking the drive may have somehow become corrupted, I rebooted back to the internal drive — running OS X 10.8.2 — go to the App Store and attempt to download Lion 10.8.2 to re-install on the external drive. App Store refuses to download with an error message that my computer is not compatible with OS X 10.8.2???? Not compatible — it is running 10.8.2!!!
3. I happen to have a copy of the OS X 10.8.2 combo updater, legitimately downloaded from Apple, on another drive so I open that and launch the installer. The installer goes through a few steps and then informs me "your configuration is not compatible with OS X 10.8.2".

At this point I am stumped! Any suggestions before I haul this puppy to the Genius Desk will be gratefully accepted.

I just answered my own question with a little help from the Apple support forums. Apparently the newest Macs, at least the Mac minis require a build of OS X 10.8.2 that is later than the one currently available for download through the App Store — or anywhere else for that matter. Guess I will just have to wait until Apple either updates the build (not the version) on the App Store, or 10.8.3 ships.

One additional piece of information on the difference in the off the shelf OS X 10.8.2 build and the build shipping in new Macs. Part of the difference is in Disk Utility in the build shipping with the latest Macs recognizes and knows how to deal with Fusion drives.