Ventoy is taking its sweet time installing. This may be the last attempt tonight - I’ve been needing to fix my sleep schedule so I don’t want to stay up past midnight again and it is hearly an hour to midnight
Also might be good to actually review this in case using ventoy doesn’t work before it gets buried and forgotten about Updating BIOS on a Lenovo laptop - running into an immediate problem at the first step with innoextract - #125 by sammiev
Ok Ventoy took quite awhile to install and it took me a second to realise what was going on with ventoy. But now hopefully it should be smooth sailing. Copying the iso into ventoy’s first partition on the drive
Speaking of, it’s done. Now I just need to boot into the usb I believe, unless I’ve missed any steps with ventoy which I am quickly checking
Rebooting now
I think I have missed a step somewhere. Was expecting to see usb as a boot option but wasn’t there. Now gparted can’t read from sda1 (the usb drive), nor can I mount it. I get some errors about not being able to lookup blockdev or something.
I can’t do anything more tonight. Maybe I’ll continue tomorrow, maybe later than that. But I need to go to bed now.
The current plan though when I do return to the issue is to fiddle around with ventoy some more to get it working so I can boot into Hirens again, and if that isn’t enough then look at sammiev’s pictures for reference. If I end up nowhere even then, then I’ll make a post on Lenovo’s forum.
This is how I do it. Flash it. Also save the updated firmware.exe to the same USB. Boot from USB into Hirens, and run firmware.exe. Very simple. I’ve helped a number of users in telegram with it. I’ve been having sucess with this for a few years now.
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Longer and less desirable method: Install Ubuntu on an external drive. It will find the firmware updates for you and add it to your system updates. 
Lenovo told me that Thinkbooks are not able to get bios updates using fwupd but can be updated with USB but I would need to extract the exe file which I did and it works great with hirens. Lenovo even gives an option to extract the exe file from the installer.
My next laptop will not be a Lenovo and will have a UEFI BIOS Update Option.
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You will still only get the updates that have been made available to linux by the provider. Lenovo for example only really send stuff for Thinkpads as they support some, and develoeprs are far more likely to use them and not the pedestrian stuff. Computers for home users (more like @anon26269396 's ThinkBOOK by comparison) don’t see (as much) support generally. You can see a list of what is currently available for updates here:
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I was told this about 4 years ago about the Legion as well. Had used Hirens for other Systems that were Legacy prior to getting the upgrade. Using Hirens has always worked like a charm and I appreciated the fact that I didn’t need keep Winblowz on it just to do BIOS updates. (Well Keep it on the disk I would have just get another for Endeavour 
)
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My 2 cents here is that hirens bootcd is missing some parts to execute the firmware update correctly?
In other words it might be missing some parts that make the connection to the flash chip possible.
It might work with a full Windows install.
I did have problems with navigation update software that didn’t want to run on hirensbootcd but did on a full install
In my view it should be possible to use the iso provided by Lenovo to update the firmware, but i have no experience with Lenovo at all
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Since the op did mention that this was a new system there could be some merit to this. Windows is not my strong point at all. I really left it back during the days of XP I had a dual boot for a while (mostly for solitare and freecell) but decided during Windows 7 that MS eco system just wasn’t my cup of tea.
I assume I didn’t have issues because my bios updates are for older hardware as far as Lenovo is concerned. I do hope the OP makes it back and updates us on the situation.
I’m not planning on doing anything more today but just to be clear about everything:
I got it for by birthday back this December 15th from my parents. It is new, not refurbished. The exact model is “IdeaPad Slim 3 14IAN8 - Type 82XA”.
I don’t really know how “old” it is in the sense of when it was released, but I doubt it is old in that sense my any means. It came with win 11 installed on it so definitely not old.
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If it’s this new why not just throw windows back in it for like an hour, run the updates and reinstall?
I mean if you’re not having luck with hiren’s (which is extremely surprising)
I agree you can easily do that. It’s just a little time consuming. 
Edit: I’m also surprised at the issue using Hirens boot .
Could try. The biggest issue really with all of this is just not knowing what the issue really is. It could be the operating system for I we know, but then again given all I know I have no reason to really think it is Hirens, since I can boot into it just fine and other than it not detecting my touchpad has worked fine otherwise.
At 175+ posts, so is this thread.
I can say with a very high degree of certainty it’s not hiren’s. I literally just used it to do updates.
I don’t know what you mean by “the operating system” as that would be hiren’s.
There isn’t an issue booting into Hirens. The current situation though is trying to use Ventoy, at least when I get back to trying. But while using dd I could boot into Hirens just fine, sans the usb deciding it needed a lunch break for some reason lol
Sometimes the answer isn’t known at least at the time. I’ve used the Hirens boot disc many many times without issue.