recover lost blocks using Forward Error Correction

 VDMFEC implements Block ECC using a Forward Error Correction
 (FEC) code based on Vandermonde (VDM) matrices in GF(2^8) due
 to Luigi Rizzo. Given the FEC parameters K and N, with N
 greater than K, N blocks are written for every K input blocks
 in such a way that any K blocks are sufficient to reconstruct
 the data. That is, up to N - K blocks out of every group of N
 blocks may be lost without loss of data. Its primary
 application is intended to be in recovering data from
 unreliable media such as diskettes.