Just a courtesy post.
My issue was the usb drive. I was using a multi card reader with a micro SD card. Figured it might work since my BIOS recognized the drive.
Anyway, just bought a cheap SanDisk thumb drive, formatted it using dban (removed all of Sandisk's junk from it), put 8.2 on it via winimage32, and performed the version upgrades using bootable CDs (burned FreeNAS ISO images to CD via Free ISO Burner).
The next mistake I made is laughable, but seemed logical at the time: I made the thumb drive the 1st drive & 1st in boot priority, but I left my old FreeNAS OS drive (SATA) pulled into the mobo. Not sure why, but the old IP settings kept showing up.
Final solution: unplugged the old drive completely from the mobo, confirmed BIOS boot settings, and all launched well.
After configuring LACP exactly like the old configuration, I was able to HTTP into the GUI.
Best part, even with version 9.2.1.7, I was able to upload my old configuration file from 8.2 with no issues.
RSYNC & all the shares are working perfectly.
I had screen shots of every single configuration on this server because I was preparing for a complete manual reconfiguration. Thankfully, the old configuration file saved me hours worth of extra work.
Thanks for the feedback! I'll wait a month to verify system stability, and then I'll repeat this process for the main server (after of course I confirm RSYNC has everything backup).