R710 won't recognize disks outside of OS installation process

I had esxi 6.7 on it from before. It sat for a while but I recently got it out and was using it without issue. Then I noticed that it was now in evaluation mode or whatever and noticed the license was blank. I had a free license on it before and now can't seem to get a new one through VMware for this version and doesn't look like I can update either. So I decided to try installing another hypervisor.

Now, I can't seem to get anything to work. When I boot from a CD or flash drive to install something (Proxmox, Xcp-ng, even esxi again) I can get through the installation just fine and it sees all my drives (inside the installation program) but after a "successful" install, I reboot and it doesn't detect any bootable drives. I've tried installing on different known-good drives with the same result although due to the extremely slow installation onto the USB, I've only tried it once (proxmox took like 6 hours on USB while only around 10 minutes on disk) and it also failed to boot. Esxi was initially installed on the same USB. I've tried both legacy and UEFI. Every time I'm met with the same lack of a bootable drive. Loading up the boot menu I don't see any of my disks. Only my optical drive, internal USB, and the NIC. BIOS version is 6.6.0 and is the latest.

My disks are all 3.5" SATA and the capacities are 80GB, 500GB, 1TB, and 2x8TB. All were working perfectly on the old esxi install. There is no RAID on them. I am using a H200 controller.

Not sure if related but my boot order is CD, hard drive/USB, NIC. Sometimes it won't even boot the CD and skips straight to NIC but typically works after another reboot. I replaced the CMOS battery just for s&g even though the BIOS would hold settings changes and the battery also checked out with a multimeter. I reseated everything in the case.

Please help. I've spent so many hours on this and it is killing me.