what checking can i do in recovery mode before trying to finish booting?

[Robert P. J. Day]

   the backstory: in a fit of bad judgment yesterday, i ran  
"do-release-upgrade" on my 11.04 system, and ended up in this situation:

http://resalxh.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/upgrading-to-ubuntu-11-10-on-dell-latitude-e6400/

after following various bits of advice gleaned from google, and  
booting *many* times from a rescue CD, i am finally at the point where  
i managed to boot one of my old kernels to recovery mode.

   so i'm at a root prompt, and "runlevel" tells me "N S", which is  
precisely what i expect at this point.  given that it's taken me all  
morning just to get to a recovery prompt, i'm terrified of doing a  
reboot and putting myself back where i was before.

   so while i'm at the recovery prompt, what are some things i can run  
to just validate the sanity of the current system, and which command  
would i use to *continue* the boot process to get me to my desktop?

   as i said, i'm scared to do anything that would cost me this root  
prompt that's taken this long to get to.

rday