Failure to calibrate laser power level?

I have the exact same problem - I took my imac in to get the burner replaced and the problem keeps happening. Applestore said they had no problem burning "dozens" of cds. But the problem is intermittant. They said they used "imation" discs - and after failing to burn with memorex, tdk, fuji and other major labels, imation discs have also "failed to calibrate laser power level"!

I've heard I should just clean my cd lens - but the cd player rejects both cd cleaning discs I have bought!

Does no one have an answer to this?

try cleaning the lens with a CD lens cleaner... had the same problem but cleaned the lens with a can of air with the hose sticking just a wee bit inside the slot and let it rip for 5 or so seconds and i'm burning some goodness in itunes right now!

The lens-cleaning discs with fibers that actually make contact with the lens are bad news. They can easily scratch your lens and make your problems worse. I recommend the compressed-air method. It's tricky not to blow more dust onto the lens than what you started with.

I had been running the same Matshita UJ-815 that came with my 1GHz PB for a year or so without problems and then around the time I moved to NY (early-2004), I found that I couldn't get media that would burn, neither CDs nor DVDs. Before I started having real problems, the comp was still picky about media and would not burn Sony, TDK or Maxell media but after I moved, not a single brand would work. It would show the "failed to calibrate the laser power level" message every time. I temporarily solved my problem when I bought some media when I was back home visiting the Midwest and the discs happened to burn fine in Toast and in iTunes. Then about halfway through the spindle, only one of five discs would burn. I tried the firmware flashes without success.

I was going to take it to Tekserve to see what they could do but then someone told me that I should just buy a new drive and install it myself. So that's what I did. I just installed a new Superdrive (Matshita UJ-85JS/UJ-845-B) the other day and it works like a dream. It was good to get in there and clean the computer too! I am happy that I'm finally able to burn discs again, having been essentially crippled for a very long time. I know this doesn't answer your question but I just wanted to share my laser calibration woes as well. Hope you get this sorted out.

I ran across the same problem. I keep my MacBook Pro on most of the time so it tends to generate a lot of heat on whatever its placed on (a desk in my case).

I wedged something underneath the front of the laptop so its sort of angled and the area underneath the DVD drive (in my case, a Matshita DVD-R UJ-846) isn't in contact with a surface area. Theory goes that heat can dissipate from underneath the computer if its not touching something.

Works like a charm every time I get the "failure to calibrate laser power level" error message or when blank DVD-Rs are inserted and popped right back out.

I'm assuming the heat generated from the computer is affecting the drive function... a stretch of the imagination since I'm hardly an engineer. Hope this helps. Good luck.

I'm royally confused.... I can burn in itunes on to blank cds BUT i can't burn using toast? I have tried Maxwell DVD-R's, Fujifilm CD-R's, and TDK DVD-R's the only thing I can get to work is the Fujifilm CD-RS in itunes. I have used the TDK DVD-R's before on iDvd and they work WHY is this stupid superdrive so picky with cds?

I have the exact same problem. I can burn cds in iTunes, but not via Disk Utility. It's always the unable to calibrate the laser power for the media, however the same disks and same ISO files will burn on my iMac. I'm doing this on a MacBook Pro. Both machines are running 10.5.2

HI,

I'm also having trouble burning DVD. It does not matter what I'm burning or what type of media I'm using. The only thing that I found to make a difference is that when I restart my computer I can ALWAYS burn anything, but if I try to burn a second copy, it will fail to calibrate the laser power. I don't think it is related to temperature, because just by restarting your computer it won't have time to cool. Also, even when it is cold I can burn one copy, but not a second one.

i have had the same "Failure to calibrate laser power level." problem.. after wasting about 8 dvds and almost given up, i tried the COMPRESSED AIR method, and it worked, or at least seems to have, disks burn now. place the spray stick just inside the macbook/pro and blow turning it around so that it gets at the whole area.

seems to work just like that.

good luck to any one else.
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I have the same thing, unable to burn a DVD due to this message. The strange thing is that I think its not a defect of the drive but something in OS X. I have parallels with Vista installed and as I move the file to burn to Vista and burn it with Magic ISO it works perfectly. The same ISO file is impossible to burn with whatever OS X app.

Maybey someone can explain why

Don't know if this helps but...

I'm having a problem burning a back up CDROM image. I'm using Philips 52x CD-Rs on an iMac and I'm trying to back up a dual format program disk (boots to PC&Mac) and I made a CDR image of the disk but when I tried to burn it I get the message

Unable to Burn "cdr image filename here" - The device failed to calibrate the laser power level for this media.

I tried it with more than one disk and got the same message but I successfully ripped a 700+MB backup onto one of the "failed" disks using a burn file in Finder and can burn DVDs just fine, so it's not the superdrive because it can burn a CD or a DVD OK and it's not the disks because they can be burnt using finder so it must be either Mac's Disk Utiliity or the image file, don't ya think?

i have the same problem with the macbook pro - this is really ridiculous that I can't even burn dvds nor cds. I am trying to use the builtin finder's burning program and remember using it without problem back with tiger. But now with 10.5.2, it's completely failing on every disk. Anyone try it with 10.5.3 yet?

I have 10.5.3 on a brand new MacBook pro I just purchased Friday night (May 30th). I have not been able to burn a single DVD with it. I have not tried CD's because I don't have any handy. I'm pretty disappointed about the problem, especially since I have spent the whole weekend setting it up, moving over data and what not. I cringe at the thought of carrying back but that's the way things are looking.

Also tried creating another user account and burning from there, no luck. Saw that mentioned in a few places as something to try. Some folks have also said something about changing the language of the system, sounds obviously bogus and unrelated to the issue at hand.

I've successfully burned (going on my 3rd dvd) at 2x. Can't seem to burn any faster than that without the problem popping up. Hope this info helps someone out. I'm calling Apple first thing in the morning and I'm going to return the MacBook if I need to because I'm concerned about the problem and the long term life I can expect to get out of this $2100 investment. This is the second Mac I've owned, the last one was well worth the money, this machine has made a bad first impression for me on their intel line. Luckily I just bought it on friday so I should have no problem getting a full refund if I decide to go that route and hopefully someone from apple will read this thread and see all the problems people seem to be having out of these SuperDrive devices and maybe do something to address it. I personally expect little more than the machine to work as expected and I would call the laptop a lemon but I've seen so many people with this problem I just don't understand how there can be no known solutions for it. Hardware or not, this issue has been going on (as far as I can tell) since January of 2008 and for it to still exist on brand new hardware is disappointing to say the least. Anyway, I'm done with my rant and I hope they fix me up because I really like the new laptop.

I was having the same problem as everyone else here ('laser power level' burn error on DL discs).

The only solution that works for me is simple, but brutal, which implies the problem on my end is very likely software-related:

1. Dust off old FireWire drive. Re-initialize if needed.
2. Install 10.4 on FW drive (no updates).
3. Boot off FW drive.
4. Use Disk Utility on new system to burn one dual layer DVD.
5. Reboot on old system.
6. Re-initialize FW drive.
7. Install 10.4 on FW drive (no updates).
8. Repeat as needed.