Hello,
Thank you for your response.
I'm not booting UEFI. The motherboard does not have UEFI NVME capability. However I can boot UEFI from sata and sata legacy.
As to the answer to your question about fresh install, it is a fresh install from the instructions provided on the site. (very good by the way).
I have tried UEFI sata boot, same results. Everything works... however the update does not.
Added in 30 minutes 3 seconds:
I was successful!
This is what I had to do. 1. NVME drive is an image from the original SSD drive, I used to set a new fresh install. 2. NVME drive was formatted HFS, the update demands . APFS, so I used the installer to convert the NVME from HSF to APFS according to APPLE support. , still I was getting an error update would not install. 3. I booted the SSD. (slower ofcourse). I ran the Update again, but I told to apply the update to the NVME drive instead of the SSD. for some reason, it was able to apply the update. Success!, I shut down, removed the SSD, connected the Clover boot drive "sata", booted, it see's the nvme APFS (as before), booted! I went though setting up Siri and other items, and DONE!.
It seems, that in this system , the update won't install on the same drive it currently booted from...weird. In all the same SMBIOS was used.
Its done, however, its still not suppose to work this way. I tell you this, the update took 5 minutes!