I wrote a routine to dump first 40 bytes of the XDATA to the LCD and verified that xdata is not initialized (variables initialized).

I checked the debugger and verified that variables are initialized by the initialization code.

(From the previous posts) Printing the same value before and after strcpy() was because of the capacity attached to the RAM. Since it is never initialized, values from the previous run was on the memory.

I'm 99% sure that LCD code/HW is OK. I tried to print a constant as follows:

lcd_print(0, 0, "test");

However this printed no chars.

Based on these two, I concluded that data from code space cannot be read.

I do not know the reason, but of course HW is suspected. So I'll check the HW.

Thanks for reading and kind comments