ISO EFI boot option for Mid 2012 MacPro - it will NOT show up no matter what! Please help!

I have a MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012) Intel HD, 16GB ram, intel core i7 running Catalina 10.15.7. and started my OCLP journey yesterday with version 2.0.2. I downloaded OCLP and saved the installer file for Monterey onto my WD My Passport external drive (1TB size). It went through the copying process like a gem, and tells me in the end that all was installed successfully.

Since I want to keep my data on the HD I built/installed OpenCore onto the WD external and rebooted. I have repeated this process ten times yesterday, also reformatted the WD external 20 times just to make sure that is not the issue. No matter how often I repeat this, when I reboot and hit the option key, I only see the internal mac HD pop up, I can't see the WD external or the EFI boot option. When I boot into the existing internal HD (because that's all I have), I can see my WD external pop up in the menu, it is named correctly and has the Monterey installer on it, I can see it all, also changed the cable connected the WD to the laptop, it works perfectly. Throughout the whole installer process there has never been one error message. Do you know what I might be doing wrong? I've spent the past 24 hours working on this to no success and would appreciate any wisdom that might help, thank you in advance!

submitted by /u/coccinelle13
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