Comment 5 for bug 121943

This just happened to me too, I reformatted an old WD 205BA drive to a single primary fat32 partition and when I try to access it again dosfsck takes 100% cpu.

here is the info you sought in a prior comment:
vincent@gq:~$ apt-cache policy gparted
gparted:
  Installed: 0.3.5-1ubuntu3
  Candidate: 0.3.5-1ubuntu3
  Version table:
 *** 0.3.5-1ubuntu3 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
vincent@gq:~$ sudo gparted
======================
libparted : 1.7.1
======================

At this point gparted launches but never gets past "scanning all devices" and dosfsck takes 100%cpu.
when I kill dosfsck gparted proceeds and displays the usual stuff except that the offending partition has the triangle-with-and-exclamation point icon after the device name.

I've given up and put an ext3 partition on it instead - but I hope this helps because fat32 is sort of the lingua-franca of filesystems.