Hard lock with Nios 2 cyclone dev board

sorry,

i have overlooked that you used the quartus programmer,

but you don't have to use quartus to program the fpga with a .sof file,

this only writes the .sof file into fpga ram and everything is lost after

reset.

you have to use the flash programmer from NIOS ide tools menue

and flash your successfull generated program with the .sof file

into the flash on the development board. (user image).

so after step 9, goto ide -> tools -> flashprogrammer.

flash your software file and hw user configuration

after this, reset the board (user image should load succesfull)

and try to start the debugger by menu -> run ->debug...

in general:

the quartus programmer programs the .sof file directly into the

ram of the fpga (everything lost after reset).

the nios ide flash programmer converts the .sof file into a .flash file

and programs this file into the flash on the board. After reset the

configuratin controller (epld on board) loads this hw description from

the flash and writes it to the fpga ram.