How can I copy and paste?

So I was at my relative’s house doing some work on their Vista Desktop and Vista Laptop, and I came across a strange issue. I discover the power supply is dead on the Vista Desktop. They didn't care too much for the desktop, but wanted to transfer the data. I have a HDD docking station to copy all the files onto an external drive they have (there was more than enough room on it.)

I start copying the files using their Vista Laptop and everything is going smoothly, but during the transfer (10/150GB completed) my uncle runs into the cord and unplugs it... Since they don't want duplicate files I attempted to delete the folder containing the incomplete transfer, however there was no option to delete. I actually couldn't delete anything off their external drive.

Deciding to manually scrub the folder later, I try to create another folder to redo the transfer. But now I can't even make a folder... I can't even transfer anything to the external using that Vista laptop. Luckily I can take files off the external and put them anywhere.

This is where it gets weird. When I plug in the external to my own Windows 8.1 laptop, everything works perfectly fine. I can delete, create folders, copy files on/off ex-HDD. Unfortunately, I don't have all day to transfer 150GB of data on my personal computer.

I did some research and found somewhere uninstalling and reinstalling the Drivers for the external might work, but it did not. At this point I had to run off to somewhere, so I had to leave.

I'm probably going to end up going back tomorrow, but idk what to do. Everything was working fine until the plug was pulled. I have an Ubuntu Linux Live Disk on a flash drive, I was thinking I could use that to transfer the data. But, when I go back into Windows mode they still won't be able to put anything on to it after I leave. So yeah, how can I copy and paste their data with minimal effort and time?

P.S. Keep in mind their Vista laptop does NOT have enough room to store what's on the external.

The only time i've ever encountered a similar issue has been with a USB thumbdrive. It was definitely failing and even using utilities from the manufacturer in an attempt to either recover the data, or even just format it to be usable again, caused the program to crash. Yours doesn't seem to be the case since you say the hard drive is working on your own machine.

I have a feeling your problem isnt so common and there likely isn't a quick fix for it.

If i had to guess, since they have both a desktop and a laptop, they must have some kind of LAN. Add your laptop to the LAN, with the external dock, and use your laptop as an inbetween? If you want faster speeds (since Wifi may be involved), then may just directly connect one laptop to the other via ethernet. If its a modern enough laptop, you may not need a crossover cable and the NIC's can talk to each other, this way you can get Gigabit speed file transfer.

i was thinking you transfer everything to your computer, then as @XaosII said, connect your laptop to theirs. i think you can do that using either an ethernet cable or USB cable but the ethernet would certainly be faster.