JPH05347075

PURPOSE: To realize a method for correcting an adjacent block by means of on-the-fly by latching error syndrome information to a syndrome latch and deciding the correction of an error having a probability by means of a microcontroller. CONSTITUTION: Recovered information concerning error syndrome information is obtained, presence or absence of an erroneous burst inside a data block and information recovered in a residual latch when the erroneous burst exists is latched in the syndrome latch 68. Then, an error correction service routine is requested to a microcontroller so as to be executed and the byte of recovered information is selectively transferred from the residual latch to the microcontroller. The position of the erroneous burst, that is, a correction value is decided by using the microcontroller by a Reed-Solomon error correcting algorithm realized inside the microcontroller by the service routine.