Hi Jake,
Thanks for the reply... I kinda dawned upon me that this was a lost cause because as soon as the board arrives, the program would be redundant and also that since the nios II procr runs on and access on the hardware provided to it, i don't think that there would be a provision to access h/w (COM ports etc) on the mobo of the PC which has the IDE...
BUT:: I am having problems using the Altera Host Based File System. I have already posted a msg on the nios forum but haven't heard from anybody yet. Any kinda help on this topic would be much appreciated...