In case anyone else is stuck like i was booting the arch install media on the system fore the first boot.
Secure boot is enabled by default and pressing F2 on the failed to boot screen brings you directly into the system setup config where you can’t disable secure boot, so in order to hit the f2 window before teh boot is attempted and fails set a boot timeout of 5 seconds or so so the system will wait 5s before trying to boot so you can hit F2 and get into the boot selection menu and disable secure boot, then you can go back into setup and remove the boot timeout for fast boot times once more.
hope this tidbit of info saves someone at least 30 minutes, which is what it would have saved me. 