Failure to backup files from Mac partition while in Windows 8 partition I am running Windows 8 and OS X Lion using Bootcamp, and ran into an issue where OS X is no longer bootable (empty gray progress bar on startup).  Googling this error led me to believe it could be any number of things, but regardless it seems the best (least painful) way to solve it is to reinstall OS X.

I am able to run the Windows 8 partition with no problem, and thought I could backup my important files from OS X to an external hard drive and then use the Recovery partition to reinstall OS X.

The issue is that, when I attempt to copy files from the Mac partition (no issue with the Windows partition), the copy/paste dialog 'discovers' all the files and then silently fails without copying.  I have seen a few possibilities for this error, however in following their steps (take ownership of target directory, drag and drop instead of copy/paste), nothing seems to work.

I don't want to clone the partition in case if there is something bad that I would be copying along with the clone, leaving me in the same state I'm currently in.  If it is the case that the HDD is failing, I would still like to have the backup of the information I need.
I did manage to recover a fair amount of the files I needed through Windows, and if anybody else has this issue it is very helpful.  I never even considered this option among the many others, but somehow it managed to pull the majority of my files off and onto an external drive.

I loaded Windows PowerShell in Administrator mode and ran the following script (it was a script to only copy directories that have files, but without modification it worked successfully):

$path = 'C:\source\directory'
$destination = 'e:\destination\directory’

Get-ChildItem $path -Directory |
    Foreach-Object  {if (($_.enumeratefiles() | measure).count -gt 0)
    {
        Copy-Item -path $_.fullname -Destination $destination -Recurse}
    }