ok, this didnt work, but, what i did find out is that by trying it, it totally fooks up all of the drivers if you already have a HDD installed
i have a usb-sata adaptor inside the receiver and a 120G laptop drive, and all was working fine. on trying the usb-serial driver it was listed as prolific device, however, it also made itself the default recording medium, and listed itself as having the capacity that was the free space that the HDD had but with no free space available for use, and the HDD reported its total capacity and free space as zero
the only way the drive would become useable again was to reboot the receiver, format the drive, as it was showing 117G in use 0.00G free, and then reboot the receiver again
i have tried this about 5 times and the result has always been the same
so.......
a USB-serial cable wont work, and if you have a HDD installed and you try it, you WILL lose all of your data on the drive
i do these things so you wont have to, play safe peeps