The system is running in low graphics mode

Question

I am using Ubuntu 12.1 and this morning when I started my computer I received the above message. From what I understand this is not an uncommon issue, and I attempted to fix it using several of the methods advised here: How to fix "The system is running in low-graphics mode" error?.

Unfortunately none of them worked for me. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 at the error screen does not give me any result, and I'm unsure how and if I can get access to the terminal. I have also tried opening it with the GRUB menu option Ubuntu, with Linux 3.5.0-25 generic (Recovery mode) and 3.5.0-17 generic (recovery mode). Either way when I attempt to open failsafex I get a screen which says (this is translated from spanish so it may not be 100 percent accurate)

Continue will remount your archive system in reading/writing mode and mount whichever other archive system is defined in /etc/fstab. Do you want to continue?

When I hit enter on Yes a black bar opens at the bottom of the screen with the lines fsck de util-linux 2.20.1 and below that /dev/sdal: clean, 187630/30277632 files, 5973800/121082880 blocks.

Below that it gives me options to type. I have tried entering commands there as advised in the link above but never get any response and eventually have to force a restart. Does anyone have any idea what I can do? It seems like if I could get access to a terminal then this would be relatively straightforward, but I don't know how.