Thanks Anand!
Our cyclone V will be running experiments and to not risk damage we plan to keep the preloader same for most of the experiments. It means, we do not allow changing pin multiplexing or any other HPS parameters.
For most of our designs the handoff folder is exactly the same, because of same pin muxing etc. Only in a few cases I observed a changed id file. Upon checking the source files used to generate preloader, I can see that this id file is not being used as a source while generating the preloader. I also scanned the entire Quartus project folder to check whose md5sum and crc values are written in id file but could not find a matching file.
I suppose the header required by the preloader will be formed by mkimage utility and and CRC value will also be calculated by the same utility right? The CRC value in the id file is gnerated when we compile Quartus project. At that time the preloader is not even generated, so the CRC from id file, can not be the CRC of preloader.
Can you throw some more light on this topic.