[Paranoia] CD without TOC, apparently

[Kyungjoon Lee]

On 1/26/06, Lennon Cook <maguswizardo at gmail.com> wrote:
> (warning: possibly noob-ish question follows)
> I am attempting to rip a CD of 'The Murder Ballads' (Nick Cave and the
> Bad Seeds). cdparanoia -B tells me:
> ---
> 004: Unable to read table of contents header
>
> Unable to open disc.  Is there an audio CD in the drive?
> ---
> The obvious answer becomes, 'yes there is' - it works fine on a dying
> stereo (hardware probably as old as consumer CDs). Also, it doesn't
> appear to be my hardware, since a different CD rips perfectly on this
> system.
>
> What could cause this to happen? My thoughts stray to copy protection,
> although I would have thought that that would interfere with the
> stereo (and, I do believe - though I can't be sure - that I copied
> this CD on a Windows machine a few years ago).

Bit rot. One of my old CDs doesn't get recognized in any of my drives
either. It does play in my portable CDP, but I've never had any luck
in ripping it since last year.

Is it an old disk without any labeling on the top side? When you hold
it up to your eye, is it more translucent than it used to be? If the
answer to both questions is yes, then bit rot may be it.

Cheers,
Kyungjoon Lee