I just bought an HPdvd 635i DVD Writer from New Egg. I hooked everything up and tried to burn a music cd with Nero. I got a "power calibration" error. I called the ever inept HP, and they told me that I probably needed a firmware update. And of course they don't have a firmware update for the device, and are not even sure if that is the problem. Any Ideas?

See if this helps:

What is Power Calibration error.


A power calibration error is caused by the inability of a DVD-RW drive to use a DVD-R or DVD-RW disk.


DVD-R and DVD-RW disks themselves have information written on them, within this Media ID code there is information that the drive uses to calibrate itself to the disk, when a drive first starts to write to a disk it will burn a small amount of data to a calibration area on the disc, using the calibration information in the Media ID code, and then try to read back the data that it has written. If it cannot be read, then disk will be ejected and fail with a power calibration error.

A power calibration error is normally caused by problems with the media. Should you be experiencing problems with your drive or the media, we recommend that a disk from a good quality manufacturer be used to test it.

For fault finding purposes we recommend the use of a disk of a known high quality, we recommend disks from:


Pioneer Video Corporation
TDK Corporation
Hitachi Maxell
Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation (Verbatim)
Taiyo-Yuden Co. LTD
Matsu****a Electric
Industrial Co.,LTD (Panasonic)
Sony Corporation