Greetings folks
Yesterday's problems have been overcome. Mostly I was just misunderstanding what was going on / what was supposed to be going on. Thanks for the clues overall.
But there is a bit more to it. At the end of the day yesterday, I performed exactly the same 'loads' command, with exactly the same srec file, as I had done at the beginning of the day, and it worked. Talk about frustration!
Today I was working on it and loaded a linux kernel image. When I 'loads' it, using the u-boot command line, into ram, the 'md' command at the loaded area shows
00010000: 27051956 d3232bea 415d1e66 0005ba2c '..V.#+.A].f..., 00010010: 7d8c5a14 3940ffff 914c0000 3bffffe0 }.Z.9@...L..;... 00010020: 4c696e75 782d322e 342e3138 00000000 Linux-2.4.18.... 00010030: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 ................
while objdump shows
00000 27051956 d3232bea 415d1e66 0005ba2c '..V.#+.A].f..., 00010 00000000 00000000 82847f95 05070201 ................ 00020 4c696e75 782d322e 342e3138 00000000 Linux-2.4.18....
of course, you'll notice immediately that the 5th word is completely bogus, among others.
I've spoken with the board developer (who also wrote a bootloader for the board) and showed him the sdram initialization function, and he said it was correct. However, I've got the behavior shown above. Is there another reason why this sort of corruption would happen? (btw, using 'cu' to download the image into RAM).
Thanks for any tips Ben