Hard Drive Issues

I have been having an issue with my hard drive on my MacBook Pro (specs are listed below). I ran into some issues after removing a previously installed version of rEFIt off of my computer and removing my two linux distro partitions from the hard drive. Also I had, after removing rEFIt, re-installed it and then went to reboot my machine. After which, it now only boots into safe mode and then fails, which causes it to shutdown. I have tried accessing it through every possible gateway. It won't force boot to the OS, which I realize would lead to corrupting my hard drive. I was able to access the computer via the single user account (<Command + S>), however, diskutil failed operation and I was unable to make any changes to the system. Any ideas on what I could do to recover the data? I had planned to make a backup, but apperently not soon enough. I am fine with wiping the computer and re-installing everything, I just don't want to lose the data.

MacBook Pro:
2011
4-GB of RAM
500GB SATA HD
2.3 GHz Processor

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)

Try removing rEFIt again and then do a PRAM reset. See if you can get the machine to boot to normal mode, or at least to the Mavericks Recovery partition. I suspect GRUB has screwed up your boot sector.

How would you suggest I remove rEFIt? I can't remove any files through the single boot user because it runs everything as read only. I tried to PRAM reset and it still rebooted into safety mode and failed to boot. Would I be able to access the drive by booting into a Live Linux Distro?

You can remove or completely disable rEFIt this way:

Use your live Linux distro and go to Macintosh HD/efi and rename the efi folder to something like efi_save or efi_bak. That will disable rEFIt. Then try doing a PRAM reset again and see if it will boot normally. If that doesn't work, you may have to remove the HDD, use either an adapter or USB carrier and attach the drive to another Mac and extract what data you need.

Perfect thanks for the help.