It is impossible to guess on why you cannot make it work. There’s even a fair chance of an XY problem so you asking the community why you cannot make it work - is an impossible question.
As I suggested above - you need to find the underlying issue - and the only way of doing that is to know excatly how to create system from scratch.
So I took the time to do a short write-up on how to create a basic system on SD-card.
Please familiarize yourself with the procedure - and along the way you may even see the 
Then you can easily substitute the efi partition on your primary disk with the efi partition in the write-up.