Failure to calibrate laser power?

Hi,

did you still use the same brand of discs as before or have you changed ?

This error message can indicate that the drive is not able to work with the brand of dics you wanna use.

Regards

Stefan

Next time you have that problem, try;
a). Reducing the burn speed and,
b). A drive cleaning disc.

Hi,

gumsies suggestion might be worth a try.

Alos keep in mind inside a pack of discs there may be more than one production lot of the discs.
So while the first (or last) couple of discs work, when coming to another lot of discs they might not work at all.

Personally I find Memorex discs not to be very trustworthy, I use Verbatim discs for quite some time now and never had problems.

Regards

Stefan

I had the same problem with the Optiarc that came with the machine. Apple care replaced it without a question. It was a sense key error if I remember correctly. The Genius bar guy said that the drive was on it's last legs and needed replacing.

Hope that helps.

I had exactly the same issue. It was reporting a power calibration error and I had the following information in the DiskRecording.log (open Console and you fond that log file there):
Disk Utility: Burn failed, Tue Apr 27 19:42:11 2010
Disk Utility: Burn sense: 3/73/03 Medium Error, Power calibration area error
Disk Utility: Burn error: 0x8002006D The disc can't be burned; it might be incompatible with this disc drive. Please try a different brand of disc, or try burning at a slower speed.

Well, from a blog it was reported by someone having this same issue. This person used the Philips DVD Cleaner and after that it started working again.
Since I had tried every suggestion including buying Verbatim DVD+R DL I figured I might give this a chance. Now I could still burn on a regular DVD+RW but my understanding is that issues would occur first with Dual layer disks. So I bought the Memorex DVD Lens Cleaner and popped it in there. After spinning for a little bit it would come back out so I redid about 3 to 4 times figuring that as long as it is spinning it will be cleaning the lens. After that I tried burning a DVD+R DL again and low and behold, the burn was successful.
Now this burn was on TDK DVD+R DL and not even on the Verbatim which according to everything I've read are the best and should be bought to prevent coasters.

I hope this helps anyone with this particular error (power calibration error) in solving the burning of DVDs. Although my issue was with DL, I'm sure it would help as well when CDs or DVDs are failing to burn purely because it is the same type of error.

On the blog it mentioned that although the superdrive has a little cover, anytime one puts a DVD or CD in some dust from the cover can be transferred to the inside and come on the lens.

Note, this was on Snow Leopard 10.6.3 on a Late 2008 Macbook Pro but my iMac G5 Ambient with Leopard (latest version of 10.5.x) had no issues burning a DVD+R DL either. I used Disk Utility to burn and when I popped in the DVD I pushed ignore when it asked what to do.

If you are using the latest 8x DVD+DL media in a drive that was built for 2.4x media, you will get that message. The drive has no idea that you are using the wrong media, it just knows it cannot burn it.