So Karmic comes with this new Disk Utility called Palimpsest. It lets you manage disks and partitions, warns you if a disk is failing (finally!), etc.
So I tried using it to delete a partition on a USB flash drive and recreate it. Just a FAT32 partition; shouldn’t be too difficult.
After it’s done creating and formatting the partition, it displays it as “4.1 GB Unrecognized”. I go into GParted and the partition is “Unknown”. Smooth.