Mity CPU Platforms » MityDSP-L138 (ARM9 Based Platforms)

I am using an IndustrialIO Rev 2B board with a Mity-DSP-L138FI-236-RL SOM in which uboot reports:

Resetting ethernet phy
Net: No ETH PHY detected!!!

When investigated using "mii device", no names are listed. I think this indicates damage to the ethernet controller on the OMAP. The problem is localized to the SOM (verified by swapping out the IndustrialIO board for another one). If this is hardware problem I find it odd that I am still able to use tftpd in uboot to copy files from a server with no problems. There was some memory corruption after a short circuit and I thought there may be only a configuration problem.

It continues to boot the linux kernel(3.2, from the latest board support package). This reports

PHY 0:03 not found
net eth0: could not connect to phy 0:03

And pauses for a long time, but eventually boots with no networking.

Subsequently I attempted to replace the kernel with one in which I had disabled the ethernet support in order to continue testing. This time the process failed and I am now unable to even reach the uboot prompt due to "no magic number found." This is the console dump of the update process.

U-Boot > tftp 0xC0700000 192.168.2.100:/home/mitydsp/tftpd/uImage
Using device
TFTP from server 192.168.2.100; our IP address is 192.168.2.5
Filename '/home/mitydsp/tftpd/uImage'.
Load address: 0xc0700000
Loading: T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T ################################################################# ################################################################# ################################################################# ################################################################# ################################################################# ########################################################
done
Bytes transferred = 1947620 (1db7e4 hex)
U-Boot > sf probe 0
8192 KiB M25P64 at 0:0 is now current device
U-Boot > sf erase 0x10000 0x280000
U-Boot > sf erase 0x10000 0x280000
U-Boot > sf write 0xC0700000 0x100000 ${filesize}
U-Boot > OMAP-L138/AM-1808/AM-1810 initialization passed!
Configuring 256MB mDDR
Booting TI User Boot Loader
UBL Version: 1.65:2.28.1 BuiltJul 11 2011 12:49:53
UBL Flashtype: SPI
Starting SPI Memory Copy...
No magic number found.
SPI Memory Boot failed.
Aborting...

To sum up do you think the original symptoms indicate damage to the mity-dsp module? If not what steps can be taken to repair the boot sector? Is there an obvious mistake I made when updating the kernel?

Thank you for your help.