On Wed, 2007-11-28 at 09:11 -0800, Zhi-Wei Lu wrote:
> Hi,

> 
> It takes the installer a LONG time to load the SCSI module "mptspi", 
> this module appears to cause a lot problems, the keys on the keyboard 
> (USB or PS2) are unresponsive except CONTROL-ALT-DELETE, DHCP and NFS 
> all seem to fail.

If you have problems with a disk or disk controller being slow to load
or be recoginsed by udev,  there is a boot time parameter
udev_timeout

On the boot stanza in grub or lilo add udev_timeout=NN  where NN is in
seconds

I would think that your problem is not this, as the symptoms sound
different. Martin will have the answer for you.
I provide the udev_timeout tip for information - might help with older
hardware.