MS-DOS formatted FireWire drive problems

Simon Spence has a problem connecting an external FireWire drive to a PowerBook running Mac OS X. The drive was formatted as MS-DOS via Disk Utility (for use with Mac and PC). At first, the drive would not mount at all. After disconnecting and reconnecting the drive, it finally mounted after about a 10 minute delay. During this delay, ProcessViewer showed that the fsck_msdos process was using up 100.4% of the CPU! You can see a screenshot of this here. Note: We have one prior report of a related issue.