A couple more data points needed.
Firstly, you say the laptop is fairly new, so I assume it is UEFI and your
"BIOS" (the thing that is providing the INT 13h functionality) is actually a
CSM? IOW, you are not running inside some sort of VM?
Similar question for the USB drives that you say work
One of my computers running FreeDOS is a quite new notebook with 2TB hard
disk of NVMe type.
(Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 2TB)
FreeDOS boots to own cca 32GB FAT32 partition.
It works but sometimes I have problems with writes. (Reading is always OK)
When I want to write something (usualy when I c