Failed to calibrate Laser?

I was a little hesitant at first about using a CD/DVD lens cleaner but finally did after I tried everything else. And it worked. The brushes are very soft and shouldn't damage the lens. They're probably safer than using a Q-tip. But really cleaning the lens was the only advice that made sense. I just didn't want to do it at first out of fear.

So can some one give a step by step method for cleaning the lens on a Mac Pro.
How does one get to it?

Getting the same laser error etc as everybody describes but only after recent update. Can't believe everybody all of a sudden has dirty lenses !

Why no Apple input?

I had the 'failed: laser calibration' error using Toast Titanium, and Apple Burn folder. I had no problems playing CDs /DVDs but couldn't burn either of the..following an idea in this post, I wrapped a lens cleaner cloth (from a pair of sunglasses) around a credit card (one without metallic numbers as these could scratch), sprayed some Screen cleaning solution onto the underside of the cloth and inserted very gently, the card into the CD slot on the machine. I pushed it in about 1.5 inches and very gently rubbed along. tried a clean DVD in the machine and Hey Presto! DVDs are burning again!! Lovely.

Confirming that the manual cleaning procedure worked for me. At least for the first burn.

I had the same problem and found that using one of those cleaning discs (they look like a normal disc, but have a little brush on the data side) worked a charm for me. Originally I was seeing "device failed to calibrate the laser power for this media" errors in Toast and Finder, but this solved the problem instantly. I suspect with the slot loader on my Macbook Pro that some dust or other gunk had gone onto the glass on top of the laser and this was foxing it.

I wrote a blog post ( http://www.garysmith.org.uk/blog/index.php/blog/show/Matshita-DVD-R-UJ-857E-prob lems---dirty-laser.html) which has had a lot of other favourable comments from people suggesting that they'd had the same problem with the same resolution.

Cheers,

Gary Smith

Cleaning the laser definitely does the trick. Cleaned a MB Pro using the canned air trick. Stick the small red tube into the slot (carefully) and do a few second of burst. Works like a charm. 😉