Tandon TM-100-2A drive, read head disconnected from "upper finger"

I have acquired a Tandon TM-100-2A 5.25 inch floppy drive for my refurbished IBM 5150 PC.

I cleaned it all up, connected and switched on. Inserted an old Compaq (D SDD - I think it should be SDSD really) MS-DOS boot disk (the only boot disk I have) and of course it didn't work. The light came on and appropriate noised, but it said non-system disk or disk error. I tried a few times and man it booted into Dos 5, I was so happy. Happiness is a transient thing though and no matter what I tried I could not get it to boot again.

So I took the drive out and inspected carefully and then I noted that the drive read/write head itself was detached from the upper finger and just floating around at the end of the tiny ribbon cable. If the disk was inserted it just pushed the head to the back and didn't make contact with the diskette surface.

I've detached that part of the assembly (the upper finger apparently) - just unclip the two cables and two screws and tried to take some pictures to see what was going on.

I'm not having much luck getting clear pictures, I'll try again if needed.

There seems to be no obvious way the read/write head is attached to the plastic surround, I suspect some vital piece of the black plastic surround has broken off.

My question is: should this read/write head be "floating" within the black plastic surround or is it fixed. If fixed then I guess I need to glue/epoxy it in somehow (yikes!)

Thanks for any suggestions or ideas

Gordon

I noted that there was a little copper tag (on top of my finger) connected to to the surrounding copper that had broken off. I have soldered it back in. The little plastic cylinder/plug seems to be a stop. Re-assembled. Also noted a transistor had broken leads so soldered that back in as well. Drive boots seems to search for a boot track, but get no system found or drive error still. Oh well. I need a proper 360 dos boot disk or a disk alignment floppy - any ideas? I'm in the UK?

And just to blow my happiness I built one of those XT-CF-Lite v4 kits. Even spent ages figurng out loading a dos image onto a cf card. The thing booted to xt-ide, but not with CF card. In trying to solve that problem (resoldering/reflowing) I stuffed the cf connector and pcb tracks. What a day.

Those little beryllium copper tabs that have broken comprise the head suspension mechanism. Re-soldering won't work. Your best bet is to find another head assembly for it.

Or unplug the Cable for that Read Head and use it as a SS/DD Floppy Drive.


Larry

The back side (top when in the drive) of the floppy needs to be supported. Usually done with a hard felt pad.

Thanks for the advice and help. Happily I came across an Ebay listing for three drives for parts. I should be able to make something happen from that

Still need to source a proper boot floppy or two in the UK.

Oh and in the initial post I now realize that DS DD disks are usable, my bad.

Gordon

Found an article that describes my issue and confirms that it is almost impossible to fix. The solder is holding up so far, but I'm sure it will break. Thing is the alignment has moved so until I get a working floppy (soon) I can't do anything. I've also had to purchase the correct imperial allen key to undo the clamping bolts. Man this thing is a money pit