A method of decoding interleaved Reed-Solomon codes to achieve an improved performance for burst errors is described. The method takes advantage of both interleaving and erasure decoding to increase the error correcting capability of a system without necessarily depending on channel reliability information. The observed correlation of burst errors in interleaved systems is advantageously used to achieve an improved error-correcting system, wherein a first code word is decoded, and the error locations in the first codeword are used to determine erasures for the remaining code words in the same interleaving block, and finally, decoding the remaining code words in parallel.