OMV 4.x.x installtion hanging

Hello, brand new user here. I'm trying to install from USB onto an SSD. Everything seems to work, but the process hangs at "complete the installation" and says it will reboot into the new OS. I remove the thumb drive, hit Enter, and the system churns away for a few seconds then brings me back to the same screen, "complete the installation." This just repeats.

If I do a hardware reset, I get a message that's there no bootable media,so clearly the installation has not completed.

What's going on? Am I completely missing something?

My CPU is an AMD Athlon X4 860K. and the proposed system drive is a 32Gb SSD.

Thanks to anyone who's willing to assist the noob.

Additional info. Forcing a UEFI boot from the SSD gives me a string of "no arrays" messages and fails to find some files it needs; Finally, the system drops to a shell. At this point I can do nothing since my keyboard is not being recognized.

Yes, I chose the SSD as the install path. It's a brand new SSD that has only been used in this build, though this is my second installation attempt. The first try was with this same thumb drive using UNetbootin (on a Mac) to make the ISO, whereas this time I reformatted the thumb drive (FAT32), redownloaded the ISO on a different machine (a PC), and used Etcher to make the bootable drive. Exactly the same result.

Is formatting the SSD as EXT4 essential? The guides I read do not specify that.