Did I fry my SuperDrive?

October 17, 2006 4:40 PM

Did I fry my SuperDrive?

The battery in my PowerBook G4 is on its last legs. Today I was burning a CD in iTunes and didn't realize that the computer wasn't plugged in. Though the meter showed 75% power, it abruptly shut down mid-burn.

When I restarted and tried to burn the CD again, the drive spun up and then aborted the task, giving me this message: "The attempt to burn a disc failed. The device failed to calibrate the laser power level for this media." Everything I can read online suggests that this message pops up when a drive is fried.

I'm curious to know if it is well and truly ruined, or if there is a way to "re-calibrate" the laser power. Is it really that easy to ruin a DVD/R drive?

posted by felix betachat to computers & internet (7 comments total)

The drive seems to reads discs just fine, btw.
posted by felix betachat at 4:42 PM on October 17, 2006

Have you tried completely powering off the machine (pulling the battery out), unplug it, then turn it all back on, and try a different CD?
posted by SirStan at 4:45 PM on October 17, 2006

I didn't pull the battery, no. I'll try that next.
posted by felix betachat at 4:50 PM on October 17, 2006

Are you using a new blank disk? It sounds to me like it's have trouble reading the half-burned disk.
posted by cillit bang at 4:53 PM on October 17, 2006

Nope. It's a new one. Same problem with both CD's and DVD's

(Though I didn't get the error message with the DVD. It just failed at the end of the burn.)
posted by felix betachat at 4:56 PM on October 17, 2006

Seconding SirStan; your failing battery may be drawing so much current there isn't enough power/voltage for the extra level burning a disk requires.
posted by jamjam at 5:11 PM on October 17, 2006

Standard Mac procedure: Try creating a new user and seeing if you can burn.

If not, possibly reset your PRAM?
posted by mphuie at 7:08 PM on October 17, 2006