New to Linux. Need help booting from USB

Hello, I'm just starting my Linux Journey and have decided to to give Linux Mint Cinnamon a go. There is no particular reason I selected that distro other than it seems to be fairly popular.

I downloaded the Linux Mint Cinnamon x64 ISO and created a USB boot drive using Rufus 4.2 with FAT32, GPT and Non-CSM.

I also tried MBR.

My goal is to install Linux on a portable drive. I 1TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus installed in an Orico M.2 NVMe enclosure. Windows sees this as a hard drive, not as a USB drive.

I burned the ISO to a Sandisk extreme Go 128GB USB drive. I boot, press F11 to get to boot menu, select the Sandisk drive I've formatted with the Linux ISO and the screen goes blank for a second, then re-displays the boot menu.

(Prior to burning the ISO used diskpart on the Sandisk and deleted all partitions with "clean").

I followed step 2 from here: https://itsfoss.com/install-linux-mint/

Looked at several posts on various sites, but all of them seem to have gotten to at least the boot starting.

Hardware: MSI Z790 Meg ACE mobo, Intel 13700KF CPU, 64GB DDR5-6600, RTX 3080 Ti, ASUS XG-C100C NIC,

thanks
joel