I'm back to post my sucessful story
It took a while for the USB-TTL cable to arrive, and after that I still had to wait til I had few work to do. These past two weeks were very busy for me. Anyway, I decided to use an old Dell computer at work to do the procedure, as it had WIndows XP and Hyperterminal. The program immediately recognized the HD, the card trick worked fine, nothing fried when I removed and reinserted the power cord into the HD, and I was able to recover all my data.
Fun fact: The PC couldn't recognize the HD after I did the procedure because that specific SATA port was disabled in the BIOS lol freaked out for a sec, but after that was sorted out, I was immediately able to back up everything from the HD.
Thank you jaclaz for helping people with this problem for almost a decade now. I'm a happy man