Cannot make my Samsung 960 EVO M.2 a boot drive

Question

I have an issue with boot drives.

Hardware:

SSD's: Samsung 960 EVO M.2 SSD/Toshiba 128GB SATA SSD Motherboard: MSI Z370 Gaming M5 Processor: Intel Core i5 8600k

When I "side-graded" from a Core i7 7700K and Z270, I installed the Toshiba SSD and installed windows from scratch. It appears windows decided to use the Toshiba as a boot/EFI partition and Windows is on my Samsung 960 M.2. I only found this when I went to take the Toshiba out and give it to my son to find that my machine will not boot. The M.2 is not seen in the BIOS of this board. Firmware is upgraded. There is an "M.2/Optane" setting, but it says all of my data will be erased if I enable it.

Windows sees the M.2 on install as it is the OS drive. I have tried every option with countless searching. I tried to create an EFI partition on the M.2 but when I try to copy the data with bcdboot it fails with a generic could not find error. I tried using bootrec.exe using a windows install USB and it does not find any operating systems. One thing to note is: the EFI partition I created is listed as "hidden" unlike the one on the other drive which is listed as "system". Attempts to change the ID from hidden failed with "Diskpart failed, parameter is incorrect". This is a GPT partition which I read could be part of that issue.

Obviously, wiping everything, removing the SSD and reinstalling windows is the "easy" fix, but I would prefer not to do that as making my M.2 the main drive shouldn't be this difficult. Everything was run as administrator or from the install command prompt. The first snag I was running into was due to trying to format the new EFI partition while in Windows. I fixed that by booting to USB and running diskpart from there. The issue now is copying the current EFI, whether I assign a letter to the current one or attempt to copy from C: with bcdboot "failure when attempting to copy boot". Any help would be appreciated. I think a lot of this is due to the partition being listed as hidden and not being able to change it (the EFI partition, that is.) do I have to maybe create that partition outside of windows as well? Why would it default to hidden if that's not a standard practice per all the forum's I read? Thanks in advance.