14. The method as in claim 11 further comprising, checking parity of said extended Golay code word with the overall parity bit when said Hamming distance check result includes exactly three logical ones and indicating an uncorrectable error in said extended Golay code word when the parity check indicates an incorrect parity.
11. The method as in claim 9 further comprising, exclusively ORing the present status of said first linear block code word with said extended Golay code word excluding the overall parity bit to generate a Hamming distance check result, after said predetermined number of bits of said extended Golay code word have been examined.