m1200 bios corrupt?

[gibingus]

My m1200 failed to load XP one day after years of trouble-free service. Even after installation of a brand new HDD I was unable to load XP from the recovery CD. BIOS recognized the drive but XP install did not complete. After re-booting I noticed that the mfgr. name appears to be slightly incorrect in BIOS setup (i.e. T2shiba instead of Toshiba). Now I cannot get XP setup to format the HDD (sees only 6032MB free on a 40GB HDD) and get error msg. that Windows cannot install, drive appears to be corrupt. The same situation results if I try to install XP on the old HDD that was in the tablet when it crashed. I suspect a corrupted BIOS that changed the MBR of the HDDs. How else could the problem have migrated to the fresh drive? I even unplugged the CMOS battery for ~2 hrs before trying the install with fresh HDD. Fortunately, I imaged the drive a couple weeks before the crash using Apricorn EZGigII and all the dat ais intact, so it should be easy to recover the system if I can just get the OS installed!
So, does anyone know if/how I can flash the BIOS without loading the OS first? Is is going to be cheaper/faster to just get a new MB?
Thanks ahead-