Hard drive transplant

[tapakidney]

I am sure someone else has been in this predicament before. My hard drive went bad, so I need to reinstall Windows on a new drive. I have successfully backed up my entire Oblivion/mod stuff/etc intact. I now have it on the new hard drive with a fresh Windows install.

 

What can I do to prevent having to reinstall everything and configure everything all over again? I have my Wyre Bash up and running, all mods still checked and in order, my bashed patch still rockin...but Oblivion will not start up. I kinda expected this. Can I trick Windows into thinking it is all installed?

[Tchos]

Should just be able to reinstall Oblivion itself, then copy your old files on top of the new install, and it should work same as before.

[tapakidney]

Good call - that worked almost perfectly. Only thing is, even though I can start a new game, I cannot run a saved game. Any thoughts on that?

[bben46]

When you install Oblivion it makes entries in the Windows registry. Without those entries windows doesn't know what to do with it, where to find its files, where to look for the oblivion.ini, where the saves are etc. The only way to get that info to Windows is to install the game. Be sure to start the game before making any changes or before installing Shivering Isles or any patches. That sets up many things and initializes some stuff.

 

Then you can copy over all of your saved stuff and it should work.

[nosisab]

Good call - that worked almost perfectly. Only thing is, even though I can start a new game, I cannot run a saved game. Any thoughts on that?

if you did backup the whole former Oblivion installed folder and the one in the My Documents, the question becomes if the partition letter is the same like before

Kind of it were C:, D:...

 

This is because something else installed at that directory would not even have an entry on the Windows register unless reinstalled 'after' the recover. If reinstalled before, the register may point to the wrong partition letter.

 

Another possibility could be the mod's load order becoming different.

[Rapeoductions]

If you still have the old hardrive there are a couple of tests to run on it. nosibab is right the letter does make a huge difference. If you can still get on the old hardrive you could back up the whole registry and transfer over if it is the same drive letter. But yuo would b ebetter off starting a new game. Because if you do not know what you are doing it could screw you're computer over. If you where to have someone else do it i could give you a rough estimate of what it would cost. Raproductions(My Company) Charges About $75.00 and we don't guarantee we can get data off of it. For the simple reason is we do not know what sector screwed up or what. But we do give a refund about $20 if we can not help you. So you are better off doing starting a new game

[Tchos]

For clarity, your save games are located in My Documents. You'll need to copy your old save games into your new My Documents folder in the same folder structure to have access to them.

[tapakidney]

Yeah, I got the saved games into the right spot, and DID actually manage to load some of them, thankfully. That's when I realized some mods are not working, hence the crash on some of the saved games. See, I was standing by a fallen one goblin in my most previous save, and that would not load. I loaded an earlier game with no fallen one around, and it worked fine. I then ran the FCOM 300 test and noticed that in every cell, it is only vanilla Oblivion monsters. So, even though mods are enabled and their files are in place, they are not working. It makes me wonder if I just need to go ahead and officially install those mods again before they will work, or if it's simply load order. Is warcry the mod with fallen ones and the little tiny skeletons?