LisaList2

I have two (of four total) external profile drives that appear to come up into solid Ready status.

They don't boot into anything.

How do I tell if they have anything useful on them?
I might be interested in trying to preserve whatever is on them, but I have no idea how to do that.

Using BLU I get the following HD Stats, if this means anything...
Blocks 2600
Blocksize 214
Device No 0
Spare Count 20
Spares Allocated 1
Bad Blocks 1

What do you guys think?

The easiest way would be to use an ESProFile card, hook it up to the ProFile in "diagnostic mode", connect the ESProFile to a PC with an USB cable, and backup the entire content of the drive into a file on your PC: https://github.com/alexthecat123/ESProFile#c-backup-entire-drive .

Then use a hex editor to peek into the data and try to make sense of it; along with the binary gibberish, there will be a lot of readable text.

Well, I don't have an ESProFile card. Maybe I should get one.

I'm not that patient, so I did a drive test, wiping the data.

Status: 09028064
Command Count 103327
Sector Spared Count 9
Seek to wrong track count 9D4
Error Count 791E7

Looks like this drive may have a few errors, lol

 You don't need ESProFile card,  If you are already using BLU, you can use BLU to backup the Profiles.

Sorry for misleading you into using an ESProFile, when BLU can do the same. I did not know...

Wait a minute, can I do diagnostics with my LisaFPGA board v3 by just connecting the Profile to the Profile port?

I forgot I had one of these, haven't had a chance to boot it up yet, or read much about it.

Quote from: Sterling on August 18, 2026, 09:55:16 PMWait a minute, can I do diagnostics with my LisaFPGA board v3 by just connecting the Profile to the Profile port?

Yeah, anything a real Lisa can do it can do. So BLU would work great. Just plug the ProFile into the ProFile port, boot BLU off a floppy, and make sure HARD DRIVE SOURCE is set to EXT.