Actually late last night I was successful with rooting.
I was unsuccessful with the first two methods.
The card was odd in that it seemed to be slightly too thick so I could not do the third method of sliding the sd card in an out because it would not slide out, I would have to use my fingernail to pull it out.
Eventually, I tried rooting to the bootloader while the card was out, then I hit recovery and plugged in the card sometime before the USB was detected by my computer and it worked. After rooting, I tried to reproduce, but whenever I tried starting holding down optical or vol down, it just goes straight to recovery mode now. is that something that is a result of rooting?
anyways, I'm happy that it finally worked.