Mac OS X Lion (Late 2010) having Recovery screen freeze with spinnig wheel

I have a Mac Air purchased in December 2010 with Snow Leopard. I upgraded the OS to Lion and now running 10.7.4 version. I recently tried to use 'Disk Utility' feature to 'Verify' the disk which asked me to repair through 'Recovery HD' which is done by restarting the computer and pressing Command+R button until Apple logo appears. I did that but after some time Apple logo disappeared and "Do Not Distrub" logo (an O with a diagnol slash in between) appeared with a spinning wheel. This didn't change for more than 40 minutes after which I pressed the 'Power' button for few seconds and shut down the computer.
I tried doing this again but same sign appears with spinning wheel and no 'Disk Utility' window as described in recovery webpage in Apple support website.
Can someone help me figure out the issue??
Thanks.

There are several ways to back up a Mac that is unable to fully boot. You need an external hard drive to hold the backup data.
1. Boot into Recovery (command-R at startup; 10.7 or later), from a local Time Machine backup volume (option key at startup; 10.7.2 or later), or from your installation disc (C key at startup; 10.6.8 or earlier.) Launch Disk Utility and follow the instructions in the support article linked below, under “Instructions for backing up to an external hard disk via Disk Utility.”
How to back up and restore your files
2. If you have access to a working Mac, and both it and the non-working Mac have FireWire or Thunderbolt ports, boot the non-working Mac in target disk mode by holding down the key combination command-T at the startup chime. Connect the two Macs with a FireWire or Thunderbolt cable. The internal drive of the machine running in target mode will mount as an external drive on the other machine. Copy the data to another drive. This technique won't work with USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth.
How to use and troubleshoot FireWire target disk mode
3. If the internal drive of the non-working Mac is user-replaceable, remove it and mount it in an external enclosure or drive dock. Use another Mac to copy the data.

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