I just tried to burn a CD for the first time, using Mandrake 9.1 and k3b, which calls cdrda0 to do the work. The CD spun up to high speed, back to medium speed, repeated this a few times, then it failed. The relevant messages are:

ERROR: Power calibration failed.
ERROR: Use option --force to ignore this error.
ERROR: Writing failed.
Cdrdao returned an error! (code 1)
Operation not permitted

Any ideas or pointers?
I looked on the www.k3b.org web site and didn't find anything.
I looked in google and didn't find "power calibration failed".

Thanks...
-TSloth

that's not a k3b error, that's a cdrtool's cdrdao error.
i had a burner a year ago that kept messing up on power
calibration. some drives have a table for types of blanks
and what laser power to use, and some drives just use
the power calibration area on the blanks to decide how
strong to set the laser for writing. there is a limited amount
of space for doing calibration and your drive is messing
up. hopefully your drive just doesn't like that type of blank
that you're using.
go to the cdrecord home page if you want a lot of info
or man cdrecord or man cdrdao

Thanks for the pointers, whansard.

- TSloth

i lost so many disks on my burner that was doing that.
especially when i tried to make an audio cdrom
with cdrecord. the drive had trouble calibrating, and
would recalibrate after every track, and would run out
of calibration area all the time. you can't even fixate
after that, but you can use those disks in a different
burner that doesn't calibrate, and just uses a table.