Hello Igor,
I want to thank you again for your help in resolving my issue. This was not as easy as it should have been but that's how it goes when you don't know what you're doing...lol.
It turns out, the issue was in the BIOS setting for SATA. I guess DELL defaults to RAID configuration and a DELL community member suggested to change that to AHCI. Before I made the BIOS change, I had returned the Gen4 drive and replaced it with a Gen3 as we had spoken about that possibly being an issue but, I ended up with the same error. Once I changed the BIOS to AHCI, I was able to do the clean install of Windows 11 and now all is good in the world...lol.
Thanks again Igor!!!
Best Regards,
TZ