The present disclosure is directed to selectively protecting a portion of a track including a plurality of data sectors. The data sectors include a plurality of user sectors and one or more parity sectors. Protected bits are designated in each of the of data sectors. The protected bits are selected to have matching bit indices across the data sectors resulting in a parallel alignment of the protected bits across the user and parity sectors. One or more selections of protected bits of the user sectors are encoded across matching bit indices to generate data values in the corresponding protected bits of the parity sectors. At least one portion of at least one failed sector is recoverable by decoding at least one selection of the protected bits when a sector error occurs at a protected bit.