Systems and methods are provided to correct errors occurring in a decision-codeword that is generated by a detector. A decoder determines whether errors in the decision-codeword are of a degree that exceeds the correction capability of a Reed-Solomon error-correction code. If they are, the decoder iteratively modifies the decision-codeword to reduce the number of errors therein. In each iteration, the decoder generates an error indicator using one or more error indicators from a previous iteration and uses the error indicator to perform error detection and correction operations.