Hi Grier,
Couple of suggestions, have you ran a checksum on your install media to make sure that the media itself isn't corrupt? What about deleting and recreating your drives on the RAID controller as well? I also found the below KB article with regards to your error. It seems like your scratch partition may be going to /tmp thus causing the error.
"When the location for system logs is not configured, your system uses the scratch partition by default. If the scratch location is set to nonpersistent storage, such as /tmp, you get the esx.problem.syslog.nonpersistent message."
Would you be able to show any screenshots of configurations screens or anything of the like?