twizted01

I've been having problems trying to talk with my hard drive through terminal software. I've tried both PuTTY and HyperTerminal, but neither seem to work. I verified that my USB to UART adapater was working fine by doing a loopback test and it passed, but when I hook it up to the hard drive, nothing comes up when i push CTRL+z. Is it necessary to connect the ground cable from the board to the hard drive as well? Might have been my problem when I was trying it. I'm using this board btw http://alldav.com/index.php?main_page=prod...;products_id=21

how do you connect the wires from a cell phone data-usb cable to the hard drive without soldering? and how are people getting the cell phone cable ends open? using any specific tools? mine doesn't seem to open easily