Replying from Mobile so, sorry for formatting faux pas.
The issue was nothing more than the alotted disk usage. It defaulted to 1TB which was actually the size of the drive itself, so of course it could never achieve that. No settings were presented before launching that afforded a way to set or change this, nor could I even see this setting while the engine was initiating. I had to force the launch into error by deleting the image file while it was being created, so that I could then adjust the settings and reduce the image size. There seemed to be no other way to “cancel” the initiation. Janky.