The method of using internal magnetic surface information from soft x-ray (SXR) measurements to facilitate equilibrium reconstruction is explored. It is shown that useful information about the shape of the safety-factor q profile in DIII-D can be generally determined from the information inferred from surfaces of constant SXR emissivity. Comparisons of magnetic surfaces and the q profile reconstructed using external magnetic and SXR data against those using magnetic and motional Stark effect (MSE) data are presented. The reconstructed results using SXR and external magnetic data are found to reasonably agree with those derived from MSE and external magnetic data. The choice of an appropriate number of fitting parameters to reconstruct the q profile is also investigated.