Issue in objcopy for EABI version of YAGARTO

I was attempting to upgrade from an older version of YAGARTO that uses 
elf to solve a problem with objcopy for my ARM9 project. After 
installing the latest eabi version I did a -i on objcopy and it reports 
it only targets elf32... formats, not eabi. I am not very experienced 
with this but I expect this is an issue.

With the elf version of YAGARTO I am using objcopy to convert binary 
data files to .o files to link into my code to access images and large 
data tables using the following make call as an example:

ESI_Logo.o : ESI_Logo.GIF
  $(OBJCOPY) -v -I binary -B elf32-littlearm ESI_Logo.GIF ESI_Logo.o

I was able to link and access this GIF, for a while, if I told ld to 
ignore the arch. Then it just stopped working and ld reports an unknown 
file format. Don't know what I changed other then my source code 
accessing the GIF data.