Are you using the ArduinoISP sketch with Arduino 1.0 by any chance? I recently chased down a problem I was having very similar to yours - avrdude "writing..." to about 96%, then failing. This thread has the details.
Try using a pre-1.0 Arduino IDE (0022 or 0023) to build and upload ArduinoISP. Alternately, the user Coding Badly is offering a patched version of ArduinoISP in that thread that should work with 1.0.
Drmn4ea:
Are you using the ArduinoISP sketch with Arduino 1.0 by any chance? I recently chased down a problem I was having very similar to yours - avrdude "writing..." to about 96%, then failing. This thread has the details.
Try using a pre-1.0 Arduino IDE (0022 or 0023) to build and upload ArduinoISP. Alternately, the user Coding Badly is offering a patched version of ArduinoISP in that thread that should work with 1.0.
Yes!! I'm using 1.0!! I will try an older version and contacting Coding Badly. If I solve the problem I will post in this thread.