Trying to recover data from partition

Question

Hello, yesterday I ran into serious issues with the mac which had lead me to do a forced shut down, after which, the mac has only been able to boot through the recovery mode (cmd+control+p+r) that takes a while to complete. Leaving the mac to load by itself without holding the keys after the chime, would lead to the apple logo "loading" for hours on end with no sign of progress.
Once the recovery mode has finished "setting up" there are several options. Naturally, I wanted to recover all the data on my interal HD before I do any wipes. In Disk Utility, the partition for my internal hardrive is grayed out and I have not been able to access it through the application. In terminal the drive is known as disk0s2, and have had no luck accessing it either.
Here's the current issue..So after an hour of looking around, there are solutions on the web to use recovery software. One of them is testDisk. I placed files for that program on my external hardrive (through another mac pc) and I'm trying to access the files via terminal on my faulty macbook. In terminal, after cd'ing to the directory, and typing ./testdisk I get the message: Illegal Instruction set 4.
Online sources have mentioned a flag -mmacosx-version-min=10.x
but it has not done anything to change the problem. My macbook is running with an OS X version is 10.7.5. testDisk version is 7.0. I've been trying to run with administrator privilege using sudo command but it appears that the command is not available in recovery mode..
So given that I'm running the mac on 'recovery mode' with limited choices, what is the best way to go about recovering partition data from my internal hardrive? Am I on the right path?

Answer 1

...the mac has only been able to boot through the recovery mode (cmd+control+p+r)
This is NOT the recovery mode. This is resetting the PRAM.
Boot into the Recovery Drive by holding down Command R when restarting.
Run Repair Drive and Repair Permissions using Disk Utility in Recovery.
Restart
Hold down the Shift key as described below. This is a safe boot mode. This will do some extra clean up on your Mac.
Safe boot
*  shutdown
*  start the Mac and *wait* for the startup chime to sound
*  after the sound, press and hold down the shift key
*  keep holding and *wait* until the grey  Apple logo appears
*  now release the shift key and just wait (it could take a few minutes)
*  eventually the login screen appears with the words SAFE BOOT
*  continue to log into your account.
Can you log in via safe boot mode?
If yes, you might want to consider running the combo updater over your install to refresh your files.
OS X Lion Update 10.7.5 (Client Combo) 1.91 GB
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1582
MORE INFO ON WHY RUNNING COMBO FIXES ISSUES
Apple updates available from the Software Update application are incremental updates. Delta updates are also incremental updates and are available from Apple Downloads (software updates are generally smaller than delta updates). The Combo updates contain all incremental updates and will update files that could have become corrupted.
Combo updaters will install on the same version as they're applying--no need to roll back or do a clean install. So if you think you've got a borked 10.7.5 install from a regular update, just run the 10.7.5  Combo Updater on that system.
"Delta" updaters can only take you from one version to the next. For example: 10.7.4 to 10.7.5 . If somehow the 10.7.5  is missing something it should have, and that something isn't changed between 10.7.4  and 10.7.5  it will still be stale after the delta update.