Hard lock with Nios 2 cyclone dev board

Thanks for the info Fischer and I see what you mean, but I am still having problems getting the files to the board. The board is freezing when it tries to download the SOF file after giving me JTAG errors. I either get "Cannot access JTAG chain" or "expecting 0xYYYYYYYY found 0xXXXXXXXX". Do you think I could have defective hardware? I'm still curious why i get all these JTAG errors and why i cant connect to the terminal for debugging using "nios2-terminal". Thanks for all the help and I will be back in 5/31 trying to get this to work. If you have any other ideas let me know and I will give it a shot. Thanks again.