Today I got out my 2/10 and tried booting it from the internal Widget before trying the ESProfile. I'm happy to announce it still boots to LOS 2 from the Widget!
(https://applelisa.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_9479-scaled.jpg)
Anyway, I had the ESProfile attached to the lower connector on a parallel interface card and LOS 2 said it was damaged and couldn't read it. I then tried to restart the Lisa and pulled up the boot menu. It gave me an error 85 when I tried to boot from it.
(https://applelisa.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_9480-scaled.jpg)
Anyone else experience problems booting a Lisa 2/10 from the external parallel card? I read some posts from last year with the same problem as I'm having. Just curious if anyone solved that problem. I do have multiple parallel cards that I can try unless someone confirms that it won't boot from an external card. I have not tried the internal Widget connector.
The Lisa was one of the very first personal computers with a dedicated hard drive. Contrary to the way we think of hard drives today, hard-drive configurations were very specific in 1983, and the software expected drives to remain in certain locations.
LOS associates its installation with the parallel port used for its startup disk. As a result, an installation is not necessarily interchangeable between the internal Widget interface, the built-in external parallel interface, and the ports on a parallel expansion card.
This is a limitation of LOS, not a limitation of the ESProFile. I would try initializing the image and installing LOS while the ESProFile is connected to the port on the external parallel card to see if that resolves your problem.
Nice!
(Gotta ask: have you backed up that Widget lately?)