If I recall correctly, I started seeing the Recovery partition in my Finder windows after I enabled the debug menu in Disk Utility while using Lion. The Terminal command used to enable the debug menu may differ in Mountain Lion:
Enable Disk Utility's Debug Menu.
After the debug menu is enabled, you see more messages in the All Messages log when Disk Utility is open.
A command for Snow Leopard is given in a comment below this article:
Manage all partitions with Disk Utility in OS X
