Yes, you can tell which you boot with: the normal recovery system boots with the usual Apple icon. Internet recovery, OTOH, boots with a spinning globe icon, not an Apple icon.
I was asking which because the built in recovery is probably corrupted, whereas the internet recovery should permit him to format his system and reinstall the os.
I agree, and that's probably where the OP is... But, some users may believe they are booted to the local recovery partition, when the spinning globe will mean that he is booting to Apple's servers (and internet recovery)
True. Though it seems he has forgotten about his post because now it's just you and me talking about it and we don't know exactly what his Mac is telling him. Interestingly enough, my MBP has an SSD and apparently never had any type of recovery partition on it. I bought it used and the previous owner who installed the SSD didn't provide it with a recovery partition, not to mention that he had the stupid thing in an MBR format as opposed to GUID so I had to reformat the drive. Then I had the pleasure of waiting hours to re-update my machine from internet recovery due to the slow wifi I was using. Long story short, I've been through this whole thing before and it sucks if you don't do it right. Especially if there is valuable data you dont want to lose.
