The present invention relates to a method of embedding an additional layer of error correction into an error correcting code, wherein information is encoded into code words of said code over a first Galois field and wherein a number of code words are arranged in the columns of a code block comprising a user data sub-block and a parity data sub-block. In order to provide an additional layer of error correction that can be easily implemented without losing compatibility improving the error correction capabilities, a method is proposed comprising the steps of: - encoding the rows of at least said user data sub-block separately or in groups using a horizontal error correcting code over a second Galois field larger than said first Galois field to obtain horizontal parities, - embedding said horizontal parities as additional layer in said error correcting code.