AVR-Chat

Just when I am starting to make headway problems set in. 

I am using WINAVR 3.4.1 with AVRDude

I have a MAVRIC II board. 

I have a bsd parallel port programmer cable. I have verified the
continuity of the cable (the 1st thing I do when I have trouble) and it
is fine. I also was able to use this cable to connect in interactive
mode to another Mavric II board using the command below I get the
following error message. 


D:\Robot\Projects\MinGrand>d:\robot\winavr\bin\avrdude -p atmega128
-Plpt1 -c  bsd -t

avrdude: AVR device not responding
avrdude: initialization failed, rc=-1
         Double check connections and try again, or use -F to override
         this check.



This all started when I tried to program the problem board with an
updated program. It did its usually reading ### 100% and device
signature messages and started on the writing #### part when wheels on
my robot started turning. It finished writing and reading again and then
it failed verification. 

Then I have not been able to connect back to the board. I have tried to
use the -F which sometimes has worked to no avail. 

The fact that the wheels started to move during the programming tells me
somehow it overwrote port registers. Who knows what else it overwrote. 

I know that the board is getting power because I have 5v on the board's
vcc pin. 

I am fairly sure it is not running any of my code because my init code
flashes leds all during the init process and I do not get any flashing
leds. 

Any suggestions?