In many case, there's no chance of booting into an option that will allow recovery mode. One main cause is the main hard drive is formatted, corrupted, etc.
However, the HDD Recovery partition is still present. How then should one utilize that partition?
It's not software controlled anymore. The good news is that machines (particularly laptops) are hard coded to access these partitions.
Each manufacturer seems to have their own way of recovery. For Toshiba, it is pressing "0" zero before booting.