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ESProfle Image Management?

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stepleton:
Thanks all for humouring my morning crankiness... this may be a simple change, but it's a really exciting new capability for the community! And it may mark a new phase in the life of Lisa OS --- how long has it been since there was a patch of any kind that added novel functionality to system? This is the first one I can remember: to me at least, LOS and the Workshop have basically been fixed in amber for as long as I've been familiar with Lisa.

I have to admit that Alex's choice of 30,000 felt like too much of a coincidence with that line in `source-PROFILE.TEXT.unix.txt`, which I had cracked open after his first message. I was minded to scan floppy images for someplace where the words $2700 (9728) and $7530 were near neighbours next --- in one of those somedays I keep waiting to come around.

And that's another exciting thing: this may be the first time that having the source code to hand has enabled a functional change to the OS, which in a way validates all the effort that Al Kossow put in to making the it available. It sounds like it's just the first of what could be many thanks to the work that's underway now.

Good luck, Alex! I can't wait to see what you've got to show us in just a few weeks!

bmwcyclist:
Just to be clear...

Am I correct that there is no Macintosh or window software available to Mount an ESProfile image for easy maintenance and manipulation?

stepleton:
Not really, so far as I'm aware, but I don't have a lot of experience with MacWorks images, so things may be a bit easier there.

An ESProFile image is a "raw" sector-by-sector representation of what's on an Apple parallel port hard disk like a ProFile or a Widget. We have these kinds of raw images for other, modern applications --- they're often called .iso files, a term that originally referred to CD and DVD images but that I think has become more generic. Sometimes you can mount .iso files on modern OSs, but they tend to be ones that store images of drives that were created by more modern operating systems.

The challenges of treating an ESProFile like a modern disk image are these ones that I can think of:

- ProFiles and Widgets use odd sector sizes: 532 bytes, which is not a power of 2. This is unusual for modern hard disks, and I would expect that most modern software that deals with disk images may have difficulty dealing with this.

- The filesystems used by various versions of the Lisa OS were not used anywhere else, and no software or operating system that mounts disk images (yet) recognises it. It would be a fun project to use FUSE to give this capability to modern Unix OSs, as some have done for reading earlier MacOS media on modern MacOS. Apple even once shipped an example of using FUSE to read old MFS volumes, but don't do this any longer. Anyway, nothing like this exists for LisaOS volumes right now.

- Let's say you want to read a MacWorks disk image. Again I'm not so familiar with MacWorks, but some (all?) MacWorks installations incorporate the Lisa Monitor OS's filesystem, so they are probably not easily readable as ordinary Macintosh volumes.

So the short answer is "not really", I think. For Lisa OS, the closest thing I can think of is Aaru made by long-ago LisaList person claunia (not seen for a while!) which at least supports read-only access to the files on some hard drive image formats. I am not sure whether raw sector-by-sector dumps are among them given ProFile/Widget's weird sector size.

sigma7:

--- Quote ---[ mis quote]
is there any software available to Mount [a hard disk used by a Lisa]
[ / mis quote]
--- End quote ---

When a SCSI drive is used by MW+/II, it remains in the same format as a MacPlus would use it, so could be moved to an older Mac with SCSI and mounted (assuming compatible drivers and so on).

As such, I think that the hard disk image on eg. BlueSCSI media might be mountable using some kind of software.

... but that's limited to images of SCSI drives, and not applicable to parallel port drive images.

AlexTheCat123:

--- Quote from: bmwcyclist on April 20, 2025, 12:42:10 pm ---Am I correct that there is no Macintosh or window software available to Mount an ESProfile image for easy maintenance and manipulation?

--- End quote ---


Yeah, Tom is right in terms of directly mounting and manipulating the image. The only thing you can really do to mess with an image from a modern computer is to convert it to a dc42 image using the tools included with LisaEm, and then boot LisaEm from your new dc42 file to mess with it however you need to. Then convert it back to a raw image to put back onto your ESProFile's SD card. But depending on what you're trying to do, this might be more trouble than it's worth!

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