Hi Lothar and Paul,
Instead of starting a new thread I thought I'd add my problem here as it is similar. I'm suing an ATMEGA 8 on Diecimla. I do not have any AVR programmer for bootloading. Hence I wired up the parallel port adapter found on the arduino bootloader page and installed giveio. The printer port is recognised. The green and yellow lights on the diecimla board are ON. But after Choosing the Diecimla option in the Arduino software, when I try to burn the bootloader using the parallel programmer option I get the same error as Paul: Invalid signature. Expected signature for ATMEGA168 is 1E 94 06.
If instead I choose the ArduinoNG or older with ATMEGA8 option in the Tools section and try to burn, I get the same erro message but with Expected signature for ATMEGA8 is 1E 83 07.
The preferences.txt file has no upload.using statement, hence I added this. But I don't know the exact syntax to put in for the parallel programmer name, id, etc., as you have indicated by Paul for the AVRispmkII. I'm using a 16MHZ crystal. I have also added the registry fix for 'DisableWarmPoll' as suggested on the arduino site.
I desperately need to burn the bootloader to my ATMEGA8. Help will be very much appreciated. Sorry about any typos.
regds
Bala C