Fried BIOS!!

I am trying to figure out what in the world is wrong with my laptop. Here are the series of events.

1. Caught a nasty virus about two weeks ago and ran Kaspersky and everything seemed fine after viruses were deleted.

2. A week or so later flashed the BIOS to upgrade it and had no problems with the upgrade.

3. Ran Kaspersky again just to see if it would find anything again and it did. So I kept running Kaspersky until it no longer found viruses.

4. I let my nephew hook up his ipod and get some songs, sync with Itunes, rebooted the computer later and BIOS read 'configuration data updated, ERROR, press f1 to resume or f2 to enter setup'. I pressed f1 and it said bootmgr is missing press ctrl alt del to restart.

6. I loaded my recovery disc and all attempts and methods to repair failed.

5. Preparing for the worst, I ran UBUNTU and got all the files off that I needed and also downloaded and ran a virus scanner from UBUNTU. UBUNTU found 4 viruses and two of them were an itunes "decompression bomb" virus which explains why I couldn't boot after the ipod synced with laptop.

6. After the virus scan and removal of important files, I formatted the hard drive and just decided to start over. This did not help. BIOS still had configuration read error going on and when I tried to reinstall vista from installation DVD it said "This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disks controller is enabled in the computers BIOS menu."

7. After this, I went into BIOS and looked to see if hard drive was disabled and it wasn't, it was properly enabled, but then I scrolled over to boot order and found the wierdest thing yet. a bunch of scrambeled letters, dashes, and a smiley face at the end instead of my normal boot devices! If I press plus or minus to change the boot order, suddenly the cdrom drive, hard drive, etc appear.

8. The next logical step to me would be to remove the CMOS battery and reset BIOS but this did not solve the problem either.

9. I find it interesting that even without an operating system installed, my computer still seems to be infected with a virus. Does anybody have anymore ideas? Was it a virus? Bad flash? Oh and I checked the ram as well it seems to be fine.

Gateway, the computer manufacturer has a windows based flash utility, how do I flash without booting into windows?

I know BIOS viruses are rare that is why I am reluctant to believe that it is. If anybody has any help on how to restore my BIOS it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!