Death ray fizzler failed to fire

Recently, both me and Frank both had problems burning CD drives in our Macbook Pro machines, while this had worked before, with the same media. Each and every burn program would end up with an error saying

The device failed to calibrate the laser power level for this media.

I ignored it a couple of times, and asked another person at the office to burn the media for me. Solved.

This evening, I had to burn the latest OpenQRM LiveCD for some testing, and once again, the error popped up. I googled it, and came up with this thread on macosxhints.com. Believe it or not, this solved my problem:

Open System Preferences.
Click on “International”
Under “Languages”: Drag any of the other languages to the top,
then drag English back to the top.
Set “Order for sorted lists” to English
Set “Word Break” to English (United States, computer)
Close System Preferences

Why? How? Wtf? No idea. My problem is solved. We tried it immediatly at Franks Macbook, and there it works also. Amazing, and confusing…

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One Response to “Death ray fizzler failed to fire”

  1. Dieter_be Says:

    Odd, I couldn’t burn cd’s on my mbp (santa rosa) even when the machine was brand new. Never really needed this functionality though (and I ran Linux on it anyway, in which it also didn’t work btw)