Can't install Sequoia on iMac 14,3 (late-2013, 21.5 inch)

For the past week, I've been trying to get a newer version of MacOS on my late-2013 iMac 21.5" with 16 GB RAM, 512GB SDD, and an NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 1 GB, running Catalina .

I followed the instructions from the "official" Github (https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/INSTALLER.html).

Last week, I tired going to Monterey, but kept on getting a "Storage system verify or repair failed. :(-69716) error. I found that I had two unmounted drives totaling 80GB showing up in Disk Utility after I went back to Catalina . Using some terminal commands, I was able to reclaim that space back.

Today, I tried to install Sequoia, but kept on ending up in recovery mode. This time I followed the instructions for "iMacs with unflashed GPU s." Holding down Option and then selecting EFI Boot didn't work either because I didn't get the option with a gray hard disk icon on the OpenCore picker. Just had my current Catalina install and "Install Sequoia" without the hard drive option. Selecting that didn't do anything. I tried this multiple times with the same result, and am back on Catalina (after resetting NVRAM to get rid of the Recovery boot loop).

I'm a little discouraged since I've spent a lot of time trying to get it to work and would really appreciate any help.

Thanks!

Author: @MapsAreAwesome