@GoldManSex778
I did try that and still ran into issues so said hell with it...erased everything off of USB drive and started from scratch at instructions for manually mounting. Since I had copied everything over using a previous copy method and that might have been causing issues.
Right now I'm copying the correct directory structure over, so hopefully everything will work properly now once I do the rest of the steps lol. If anything I've learned some things about Linux from the experience.
Final Update: Success! Thank you all for helping!
For anyone ever going through this, one of two things I think was the issue: NOT following the instructions to the letter manually mounting, or my UUID was wrong. I had the last char wrong, but could have sworn it was something different before(either new copy changed UUID, or was my error). Resolution on a laptop helps reading the characters much more clearly than on the TV screen where its almost a guessing game.
I used WinSCP to confirm that its working, and booting up was much faster!