Yeah, I should have mentioned that I already tried that. Same result. Both with and without usb flash drive. I'm thinking i may have to move the drive to another machine.
So I tried system encryption on my asus rog laptop. I got to pre-test and shut down. I also had previously deleted the secure boot keys and tried applying the keys from the git project but failed. On reboot i just have a black screen. I can't get into setup at all. I tried booting from a usb winpe but not working either. I did think maybe entering my password would work or escape but no. Only a flicker of hard disk activity. What can i try to get it working?