A magnetoresistive solid-state storage device (MRAM) employs error
correction coding (ECC) to form ECC encoded stored data. In a read
operation, a set of test cells in a test row are used to predict failures
amongst a set of cells of interest storing a block of ECC encoded data.
Erasure information is formed from these predictions which identifies
potentially unreliable symbols in the block of ECC encoded data, and the
ability of a decoder to perform ECC decoding is substantially enhanced.