changing setup

[pippo at bellnet.ca]

I have just changed my motherboard and consequently drive assignments and 
peripherals as well. The old board or processor crashed. :((
So the new board is an MSI 875-FISR - top of the line with a 3ghz pentium 
IV and Intel Gigabit lan card and kGEforce FX5200 video card.
The previous system was a dual pentium II with 450mhz processors.
The problem is the following: how do I boot and reconfigure the system?
What is installed is FBSD 4.8 stable.
When I boot up using the kernel.GENERIC, I get version 4.5 with limited 
functions... so, I don't really know what todo with it.
Whe I boot up with the 4.8 SMP kernel, kit freezes just after the network 
card is not recognized.
I am hoping I don't have to reinstall everything as that tends to be a PITA.
Also, I don't know if FBSD supports the built-in Intel Gigabit network 
adapter; the hardware.txt does not show it.
And what about serial ATA and Promise Fasttrack 378?
Any help would be appreciated...
Thanks in advance,
Pippo