I have connected an ATMega8L-8PU chip following the instructions from http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ArduinoToBreadboard, the minimal circuit (since both chips are compatible)
When I tried to burn the bootloader I got the following error message
i think you may need to disable the autoreset on the mega board ( search the forum on how to do that)
also when i started playing with breadboard setups i first tried to follow that tutorial - but after many many tries i couldn't get that bootloader working on my atmega8 - so i suggest getting yourself a copy of the optiboot (check github.com westfw version or the version that comes with arduino) compile it for atmega8 @ 8mhz and use that