This is actually quite weird. My Linkstation seems to be working now.
I did NOT do anything to fix it :)
I had turned the box off the day before yesterday, and the switch on the back was in "off" position. Today I took a Windows computer home from work and thought I'd give the firmware force update a go. However all lights on the box were still on and apparently it had not shut down as it should. Well, I turned the switch to "on" and extempore tried to log on with my browser once more.
This time the browser interface complained about malfunctioning fan and all selections were active! I promptly entered disk management, verified that the disk indeed was unformatted and formatted it. Rebooted the box, enabled a few shares and...
Everything seems to be working fine!
Now I'll need to run a few tests. I can't explain this behavior, but perhaps someone else can? Maybe it just took two weeks to get the disk check through, maybe there was something wrong with the fan (this actually worries me a little) that got the box out of a infinite loop or maybe the box just decided that it had goofed around enough and finally came to it's senses.
Thanks for the help anyway.