I've powered up a Widget standalone to ensure that it was passing its internal tests (there's a video on youtube) but beyond that you require ALL of the guts of a Lisa to do much else. My 2/5 will recognize it as a hard drive but either because of a ROM incompatibility or additional problems with my own drive, if the bus pokes at it the drive simply resets.

Formatting until recently was only possible through the LOS/Macworks installer. More recently however the Basic Lisa Utility also added support for formatting and disk exercising functions.