AsRock UEFI Boot Problem - Clover to OpenCore Conversion - Cannot boot without USB

After multiple days and hours of tinkering, I am stuck in the middle of my Clover(r5119) to OpenCore (0.6.2) conversion.

Since I already had a working Clover config, I created an OpenCore USB following the vanilla guide (and using the clover config.plist) as templates. Everything was working great and OpenCore booted up fine. However, I am unable to boot without the OpenCore USB drive plugged in. And yes, I have moved over my EFI folder and triple checked everything is in the correct location.

After some google searching, I came across a few similar issues for those with AsRock motherboards.

"The problem was that the UEFI just didn't want to acknowledge the existence of the EFI partition on my Hackintosh drive. I could select the correct SSD from the boot menu, but no matter what I did, the UEFI kept telling me to "insert boot media" and try again." See link for more details: https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/fj3zrj/booting_opencore_without_the_usb_on_an_asrock/

Essentially, this is a known issue with some AsRock motherboard. I followed the guide above and tinkered with efibootmgr using a bootable linux mint USB to create custom boot entries, but am still unable to get the UEFI to boot from my Hackintosh's EFI folder.

Another resource I used: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/guide-asrock-uefi-boot-fix.174726/

I have even tried resetting all the defaults, upgraded the BIOS firmware, reset CMOS, NVRAM, etc. without luck.

I have a feeling I may need to do some more custom boot entry tinkering in linux, but I am not really sure what direction to go with that. Any thoughts/ideas?

My full setup is as follows, but have removed all other HD's except the Hackintosh NVME drive until I get OpenCore to work:

CPU: Intel i5 8600k

GPU: RX 580 8GB

Motherboard: AsRock Z370 Killer SLI/ac (w/ original intel WiFi card removed)

32GB of RAM

1x 500GB Samsung 970 EVO NVME M.2 (Hackintosh)

1x 500GB Samsung 970 EVO NVME M.2 (Windows 10)

1x 1TB SSD (MacOS storage)

1x 1TB 7200rpm HD (Win 10 storage)

Fenvi T919 WiFI/BT card