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Comment by qiine | Hacker News Reader

soOo how do you do it ? ;p

Well, the answer I love them to start with is asking if they're single-bay computers and if not, why they can't just turn off both machines and stick the HDDs in the same box :) It's also a great signal if they can follow this up by noting that the Windows drive is probably formatted in NTFS so the Linux instance will need drivers to support it.

Otherwise, a wired network + SMB/Samba is a fine solution too, though much slower.

Even if they just suggest using an external SSD I'd be relatively happy. More than anything, this kind of question is to see what happens when a junior's asked to do something they haven't done before. Any answer but "I don't know" is a good start.

> the Windows drive is probably formatted in NTFS so the Linux instance will need drivers to support it

This hasn't been true for decades now, thankfully! Read-only NTFS support has been built into the kernel for a quarter century already (1997, 2.1.74, and a better one in 2002, 2.5.11) - and full read-write support for 4 years now (2021, 5.15).

>Otherwise, a wired network + SMB/Samba is a fine solution too, though much slower.

Robocopy with the MT flag speeds things up if it's lots of files.

These days also directly connecting two computers to each other with a network cable (not via a network, directly plugging each end of the same cable to each computer) will establish a connection (I’m pretty sure it also works with USB cables but the “automatic” might then only work between specific operating systems- it’s been a while since I tried).

IIRC last I tried direct Ethernet connecting between a Mac and a Windows pc the other computer appeared as a shared drive and I could simply copy files from it (I probably enabled some sharing option but it was easy to do either way).

im glad that my answer was an external drive, and is considered correct.

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