You guys seem to be wasting lots of time spinning your wheels and just guessing at things.
Guessing is not a good way to go about doing things and incorrect guesses
can lead to breaking things.
My suggestion is to put on your big boy pants, get out your magnifying glass,
and follow the traces on the PCB and see how the chip is wired up.
That way you will end up with a schematic of the board you have and
will know exactly how to hook things up to get it reprogrammed.
At a minimum you need to follow the traces from the AVR for:
- reset
- SCK
- MISO
- SS
- where all jumpers are connected.
- where all leds are connected
It isn't that hard to do I do this all the time on these low cost boards
from USBasp boards to Arduino shields.
It shouldn't take more than half an hour at most, and my guess
is that more than half an hour of time has been burned/lost already
just guessing at things.
Also, keep in mind that not all the vendors wire up the jumpers and LEDs to the same
pins. Some change the connections and then change the firmware to match their wiring.
So after drawing up the schematic for your board, you need to verify that connections
for the LEDs and jumpers match what is used by the firmware you are attempting to burn
into the device.
If you find that your board is not using the default wiring,
you may see that you have to go in and make some small tweaks to the actual
firmware and to make a custom firmware build for that board.
I've had to do this on one occasion.
--- bill