How to recover files from Mac OS X?

Restart the Mac while holding down command-R.
If the external USB drive is larger than the contents of the internal drive, you can restore the internal drive to the external following the instructions here (this will erase anything that is on the external drive):

http://nyacomputing.com/how-to-create-a-bootable-clone-of-your-mac-hard-drive/

Once you have cloned the internal drive to the external, reboot while holding down the Option key. This will bring up the boot picker. Choose the external drive (It will have an USB icon) and hit the forward arrow.

It should then boot from the external, but it will be much slower than booting from the internal.

Once you are booted, it is not a bad idea to rename the drive from "MacIntosh HD" to, say "USB HD" so you don't get the two disks confused.

Once you have booted from the external and are satisfied that everything is there, use disk utility to reformat the internal drive, and name it as MacIntosh HD.

After the internal drive has been reformatted, reboot into the Recovery Partition by holding down the R key and follow the steps in the link above to clone the USB drive back to the internal drive.

Once that is done, reboot normally and eject the external drive.

My wife is at the store. She's getting me another USB HDD (I don't want to erase the current one). I'll keep you posted. Thanks so much for the suggestion!

The new drive will come formatted in PC format, so you will first have to use Disk Utility to reformat it as Apple Extended Format (Journalled).

I received an error:

Recovery Failure
Recovery partition restores can only be done on GPT partition maps.

Alright, I reconfigured the partition by going into the Options and choosing the GUID Partition Table. Now I have a new error when trying to clone the drive.

Restore Failure
An error (32) occurred while copying. (Broken pipe)

Go back into Disk Utility to format the new drive.
Choose Apple Extended Format (Journalled).
Then click on the Partition Tab.
Choose "One Partition".
Then click on the Options button and select "GUID Partition Scheme".
Then click OK to format the external disk as GUID.
Once that is done you should be able to restore.

Above was a response to your earlier post, not the broken pipe message. Back to you shortly on that.

Did you use the same copy of Disk Utility to format the new drive as you are using to try to restore?
Do you get the broken pipe error immediately when you try to restore?

Yes, same copy of Disk Utility from the Restore (CMD + R) Boot. The error is within 30 seconds. I then changed it to 2 partitions on the USB drive and was given a different error message. It's like it simply doesn't want to allow me to copy the contents of the drive.

Back to trying to figure out how to access the stuff from Ubuntu Live and I can't copy the Pictures or Documents folders because I don't have permission to access them. SO FRUSTRATING

Don't forget to repartition as one partition before you start.

Installing onto the USB drive worked. Now I'm just waiting on the data transfer. Will keep you posted. Thanks for all of the help so far, Strung!

Any luck?

This worked perfectly!