Saved game issues

[jaggedbubbles]

So, my hard drive with my games partition and music partition needed to be backed up after an incident involving a broken SATA connector. I made sure the drive letters and names were the same as before, and most of my games run flawlessly. Just not this one.

Fallout 3 will not save games nor will it load saved games. Even the autosave and quicksave don't work (although, in game, it says they do).

At first I thought it might be because it patched itself to 1.7, and my version of FOSE didn't work. I got the newest stable version, and it didn't fix the problem. I uninstalled the game, saving the saved games, and reinstalled. Still nothing.

I then tried copying all the saves over to the GFWL saved games folder since that was the only other thing I could think of. That didn't work either. Even vanilla FO3 doesn't save or find the saved games directory. I changed the Fallout3_default.ini to save in the folder with the saved games and still no luck. I'm very much at my wit's end.

Just for clarification-

Game is in its own folder - D:\Fallout3.

Saved games are found in E:\My Documents\My Games\Fallout3\Saves (this is the folder that I've made Windows 7 recognize as the 'My Documents' folder).

My Windows 7 partition is on L:\.

I deactivated GFWL only after I started experiencing the problem just to see if it was the underlying cause. Like I said, even vanilla won't find the saved games folder.

[greenwarden]

Your old saves don't work correctly, but what about a new game? Same misbehavior?

[jaggedbubbles]

Your old saves don't work correctly, but what about a new game? Same misbehavior?

Oh, the saves are all there, FO3 just can't find them.

When I start a new game, it can't save. It says it does, and I can tell it to, but no save files are created.

[greenwarden]

And I know you've already made the connection between GFWL's saves folder and the typical Fallout 3 saves folder...I am sorry to not have any real help beyond moral support, Bubbles. But the thread is still young- someone may yet come along with some good leads.

[WillieSea]

Probably a registry problem. Its acting like it cant find my documents since it will neither load or save games.

Probably brought on by having the OS and my documents in different locations.

Did the SATA cable breaking change the drive letters of where the OS, My documents and game used to be located?

[jaggedbubbles]

Did the SATA cable breaking change the drive letters of where the OS, My documents and game used to be located?

No, that's the weird part. It only affected my games and music. The OS and the partition with 'My Documents' on it are still intact and where they always were. I last played about a month before the HDD issue, and everything worked fine.

I thought reinstalling would at least allow me to find where it wanted to save to rather than where I wanted it to save by creating a new game, but it just won't save anywhere.

[WillieSea]

Make sure you are running the game in ADMIN mode. The my documents could have become protected to a certain user or something.

[jaggedbubbles]

Make sure you are running the game in ADMIN mode. The my documents could have become protected to a certain user or something.

Just tried, and it was unsuccessful.

[WillieSea]

When you right-click on 'Documents' from inside your 'Windows Start' menu, click on properties.

Are your 'Security' settings allowing all access?

Is the 'Location' set correctly? Try the 'Find Target...' button. When you click that, is your 'My Games' folder inside the 'Documents' folder in that location?

[jaggedbubbles]

All right, we seem to have a fix!

Just in case anyone else somehow manages to have this problem:

I made sure the Fallout.ini file was saving to the "default" location - usually "/Saves".

Un- and reinstall, and change the Fallout_default.ini to read the exact location of the saved game folder.

[greenwarden]

I've been snooping around on the net and I've only found one similar report, where he could only save while logged in to Live? I use FOSE, so no Live for me (no loss, imo), but I thought I'd just toss it into the stew, even though I know you're a FOSE user too.