How to add the -F switch for avrdude in Arduino IDE
The error probably means that you have selected a wrong configuration.

To modify the IDE to insert the -F seems to be the hard way,
however the easy way is to make a wrapper to avrdude:

$ cd ./arduino/hardware/tools/
$ mv avrdude avrdude.orig
$ cat &gt;avrdude.sh
  #!/bin/sh

  ./avrdude.orig -F $@
  ^D
$ chmod +x avrdude.sh
$ ln -s avrdude.sh avrdude