A system and method for handling events issued as a result of error conditions in the operation of an optical disc drive include suspending processing of commanded operations in the disc drive while attempting to recover from the error condition. The recovery attempt can include increasing levels of recovery effort, such as dynamically recalibrating various components in the disc drive. The system can also determine whether a previous notice was received for the same error condition. If so, the system can determine whether excessive recovery attempts have been initiated based criteria such as the time between the notices, and/or the number of notices, for the same error condition. The recovery attempts are aborted when they become excessive. If the recovery attempt is successful, the interrupted operation is resumed at the point where the processing was suspended, such as during a write or read command.