I am working on a kernel panic issue.
As Ubuntu is very reliant on internet, I am currently investigating how to connect to internet when choosing recovery mode. Even in my healthy 11.10 system it doesnt work (nor wireless, nor wired). I ticked for both cases available for all users.
Normally, in recovery mode the netroot option should give you access to the internet, but no joy. Any idea?
When you boot to recovery mode you should get an option to drop to a root shell with networking ,
netroot
I do not know what problem you are having, but sometimes it is easier to use the live CD.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCdRecovery
If needed you can use
chroot
to access / update your root partition.Assuming your ubuntu partition is as /dev/sda1 (you may need to mount /home and/or /boot if you have separate /home or /boot partitions) ...
You should now have root access to your ubuntu root partition.