Failure to backup files from Mac partition while in Windows 8 partition
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}
    }