The authors describe an improvement to the minimum-weight decoding (MWD) algorithm for Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. The modification improves the probability of the MWD algorithm ‘trapping’ the error pattern by squaring each of the terms in the received codeword resulting in a transformation which changes the order of the symbols while maintaining the cyclic properties of the codeword. The results of computer simulations are presented which show that the modified decoder provides an improvement in error performance of ~1 dB over the conventional technique with no increase in decoder complexity. The results show that the modified technique achieves an error performance close to that of maximum-likelihood algorithms with ~1/6 the complexity.