How to install OSX on NVMe drive only (no SATA drive)
Apparently the downloads you get get off apples website use certificates that have expired. In order to work around this you have to download a &quot;full&quot; OSX install.
I re-downloaded an installer for Mojave using the following command on another mac
softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version 10.14.6

Then created a bootable USB drive from this and was able to install successfully