Who needs a Profile or Widget harddisk ?

[Steven N. Hirsch]

On Sat, 27 Nov 2004, Jules Richardson wrote:

> On Sat, 2004-11-27 at 22:16 +0100, Jos Dreesen wrote:
> > Not that I have any spare ones, but look at this site for a description 
> > of a IDE to Profile/widget translator.
> > 
> > http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/patrick/idefile.htm
> > 
> > The website does not (yet) give full details.
> > Please note that the project is not mine, we are just looking how much 
> > interest there is, therefore raise hands if interested in a PCB.
> 
> Hmm, a way of backing up / restoring to / from a machine connected to
> the serial port might be a handy feature, by the way - assuming the port
> speed doesn't knock that on the head..
> 
> I'll mention it to the others at the museum - cool bit of hardware :)
> We've got 4 working Profiles left (and a 5th that we haven't tested yet)
> so we're doing OK for working units at the moment. Good to know this
> exists though!
> 
> Getting working ST506 drives still of course isn't much of a problem,
> but far as I recall the original drives were low level formatted by
> Apple themselves prior to being shipped and neither the necessary
> hardware or software is around to do this these days :-(

Actually, a lot of it is floating around.  The only thing I've never been 
able to find is the 10MB ProFile formatting utility.  

You can perform a low-level format using a Lisa or an Apple ///.  The 
hardest bit to find is a Z8 CPU with "piggyback" socket.  There's a ROM 
image which must be burned into a 2708 (from memory) and plugged onto the 
uController.  The entire unit replaces the masked-ROM Z8 in the ProFile.

Steve

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