[SOLVED] Can't boot from Win10 installer flash drive for the life of me, help with BIOS settings?

[rynmgdlno]

This is my 5th build in ~15 years. I'm pretty familiar with installing Windows and even MacOS on a custom built PC and have never been stumped like this. I've been at this for hours now and can't get it to boot form my install drive. I want to exhaust every resource before moving to flash the BIOS. Build is in my signature.

I'm currently running just the integrated graphics, one stick of ram, and only the destination drive (M.2) connected, nothing else except for the keyboard. I can get into the BIOS perfectly fine. When I try to boot from the install media I get the endless flashing text cursor (with CMS enabled). When I disable CMS the install media is not recognized and doesn't even show up in boot device manager (but shows up in USB Device Manager).

I've tried to different Windows ISOs (both made on MacOS, one via Bootcamp assistant and one via terminal), two different flash drives, every available USB port, dozens/hundreds of BIOS settings combinations, and three different destination drives, and a few hours of waiting hoping windows was just slow loading.

The current BIOS is the second most recent version and it appears the only update to the newest one is "Update CPU Microcode to address a potential security vulnerability in CPUs", so I'm not sure updating the BIOS would have any effect.

Any ideas would be much appreciated.
Also if this is the wrong sub forum I'll gladly move it.

 

[rynmgdlno]

SOLVED: For anyone interested or if you find this post trying to solve same/similar problems, I don't know exactly why but the issue was with building a boot drive via Bootcamp/Terminal. I've done it this way for years but it didn't work this time. I ended up using UNetBootin to build a new one and it worked like a charm.