I have seen some versions of the nforce adapters not responding correctly under specific kernels. The general driver for that network card is called forcedeth. You can manually load the driver by using the command "modprobe forcedeth".

if you wish to set it to load on boot then you will have to add an entry in /etc/modprobe.d/, to find the structure look at the other fies in that directory. If you wish to pass options to the device you can find them by looking at the output of "modinfo forcedeth".