Cyclone III Starter kit & Control panel help

Hi all,

I 'am completely beginner in matter FPGA, I want to test some Designs. I have bought a Cyclone III (EP3C25 324) Starter kit board with 1MB external RAM, 16 MB CFI flash, 32 MB DDR. I need Sofware application to Read/write the External SRAM. I have found an demonstration tool "cycloneIII_3c25_start_v12.0.0.exe", which seems to fit my needs.

The tool is Control Panel which can test the board, it works (read/write) all memories, numbers should be provided in binary formats, but it doesn't work if the FPGA contains my Design. I did followings: I did a small design (Counter + SRam controller) to fill completely the external SRAM and try to check the contents with the control panel, so I had to reconfigure the FPGA with the factory image in order to get the control panel working, but i could not see the expected data inside the Sram, it gives every time the same contents i saw before, it looks like the SRAM will be overwritten (by either Control panel tool or factory image). My question: is it possible to use the control panel like that ? I expect the SRAM data cannot be lost by reconfiguring the FPGA ? My objective is to put some data in the SRAM, put my Design in the FPGA, process the data, write results back to the SRAM, reconfigure the FGA with factory image (just to be able to use control panel) and read the results from the SRAM !!! Please give me your opinion !!

thanks in advance for your help

Chahid