Patent ID: 8555142

Claim:
A method for verifying integrity of data stored in dispersed storage memory, the method comprises: retrieving integrity information of the data that is stored as a set of forward error correction (FEC) encoded words in the dispersed storage memory; receiving FEC encoded words of the set of FEC encoded words from the dispersed storage memory to produce received FEC encoded words; decoding a unique subset of the received FEC encoded words to produce recovered data; generating recovered integrity information from the recovered data; comparing the recovered integrity information with the integrity information; and when the recovered integrity information compares unfavorably with the integrity information: indicating that at least one of the received FEC encoded words of the unique subset of the received FEC encoded words is corrupt determining whether another unique subset of the received FEC encoded words generated another recovered integrity information that compared favorably to the integrity information; when the other recovered integrity information compared favorably to the integrity information, encoding another recaptured data to produce another set of FEC encoded words, wherein the other unique subset of the received FEC encoded words is decoded to produce the other recaptured data; and facilitating overwriting of the set of FEC encoded words with the other set of FEC encoded words within the dispersed storage memory.