You may see this error on Nios® II SBT for Eclipse by "make" tool with mem_init.mk when turning on "Enable non-default initialization file" and setting characters in "User created initialization file" column including colon ':' character, such as "D:\altera\myboot", on On-Chip Memory's Component Editor in SOPC Builder or Qsys.
To prevent this error, the file name must not include colon ':' character in "User created initialization file" column, for example, by managing the initialization file ("my_init_file_name.hex") at Quartus® II project directory and filling just "my_init_file_name" in the column.