I see - thank you for your answer! I guess the BIOS and EC chips could be on the other side of the motherboard? Or do you see something that resembles a BIOS/EC chip on the pictures I linked?

In the meantime I disassembled the laptop further, took out the motherboard entirely, and found one more chip that could be BIOS/EC on the other side of the motherboard. It is W25Q128JW as well - but I will have the 1.8V converter for the ch341a programmer so I should be able to read both of them. I guess the next step is to read both those chips with the 1.8V reader and post the results?...

I managed to take a better picture of the chip I suspect to be the BIOS chip:


I tried looking for that chip online and found this: https://www.digikey.co.uk/en/product...hJBch8Leh_0in8
According to that spec sheet - it looks like it should be safe to read this with the 3.3V ch341a programmer? I am still waiting for the programmer to arrive - as soon as it does I'll try dumping the contents of that BIOS chip.

Please do let me know if it looks like I'm about to...

hello friends - I have purchased a used Thinkpad X13 Gen 3 AMD variant and only after making the purchase I realised that the BIOS is locked. I have spent a bit of time browsing the forum and from what I understand it's possible the modify the BIOS that is currently on the machine and remove the password from that BIOS. For dumping the BIOS from the laptop I have ordered this ch341a programmer. Below is a photo of the password prompt:


I have taken the cover off the laptop and I found that "serial number" is "GM-0358MB" and "type number" is "21CN-S19U00"....