All the ports on the Netgear GS608 I think are meant to be auto speed and uplink sensing, I have found this not to be true. I had the 1Gb uplink to our central switches in Port 8 and a 100Mb Ethernet workstation in port 2 could not get an IP address via DHCP. When I moved the uplink to Port 1 it all leapt into life. Interestingly other 1Gb PCs in other ports had no problem with the uplink in either port 1 or 8.
So my tip is put you uplink in port 1 on a Netgear switch to avoid problems with auto sensing.