[ Thanks to jhansonxi for this link.
]
“Recovery Mode is a text-based interface to a few quick
repair tools that is installed by default with most Ubuntu releases
and derivatives. I wrote a few add-ons for it that increase its
usefulness in remote repair and diagnostics situations. These were
developed and tested on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).“Starting Ubuntu in Recovery Mode (aka. Friendly Recovery) is
relatively easy. Just hold down the shift key after the BIOS POST
to get Grub2 to show its menu, then just select the kernel with the
“recovery” option. Also note the memtest86+ option which is useful
for identifying bad RAM.“Adding on to Recovery Mode is relatively simple. At its heart
is a shell script, “/usr/share/recovery-mode/recovery-menu”, that
is started at the end of the single mode (runlevel S) boot. It
looks through the options subdirectory and starts every script it
finds, passing it a parameter of “test”. It looks for a return
status of 0 and the description of the script on stdout. Scripts
with valid responses are added together and shown in a menu listing
using the whiptail dialogger. The user selects one from the menu to
execute it.”