...I've got spare files all over the desktop and I'm trying to compare ini files...

Ah, welcome back Phon. I must say I've become quite addicted to modded Oblivion over these past few months.

Thankfully my latest install is still going strong and I hope it´ll stay that way. I experience a few bugs from time to time but nothing that warrants a reinstall.

Btw nice seeing you again, Phon!

Come and think of it, I've done at least 4 installs myself. On my old comp I did at least 3. Had to tear my entire game down twice because I didn't know what I was doing, and couldn't get things to work right. It's frustrating, but also fun in a way. The fourth install (on my new comp) I enjoyed completely. Got some Coke and some snacks. Took hours, too. At least six hours from installing the game to installing whatever mod I was up to at that time.

Reinstalls are in fact a reason for me not to have too many mods..

I know I can copy my Data folder but I also need an empty USB memory stick for it

To be honest it's a nightmare.
I don't want to start again and my backup just fails - there's too much that's going wrong.

So I think I'm gonna sit on it for a while and see how I feel about it later. It takes me a lot of investment in my characters and I never really gave this one a chance. to be honest I am loathe to start again from scratch but I can't get the install to work from the backup so there we go...

I have had to reinstall the game 4 or 5 times over the years. Once like Renee because of mod problems, and the other times just because I was upgrading to new hard drives or brand new computers. But I still have the very first character I ever created.

You can make a copy all of your save files. They are in a Saves folder in the same place as your .ini files. The exact location varies on what version of Windows you have. In Win 7 it is c:\Users\<user name>\My Games\Oblivion. You can find your mod load order in c:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Local\Oblivion. The latter is just a simple text file that lists every active mod you have by name.

One of the things I love about the Oblivion/Tes Mod Managers is that they have a Save Manager feature which allows you to look at any savegame, and it will show you which mods it uses, which of those are not active, and even which ones are not installed on your system. After a reinstall you can use that to see if you forgot to add back any mods. They even have a button that will automatically sync up your save and turn on all the mods it needs. It makes reinstalling the game a lot easier.

I am aware that you should never say never but after a day of trying I'm no nearer reinstalling. I'm thinking that maybe the game ended properly with You-Know-Who and that actually I'm not meant to play it again really.

Does that make sense?
Maybe not.

You are talking about Niamh?

I suspect Phon is talking about Elidh.

Sometimes that's just the way it works out.

My guess is on N and I understand perfectly what he means.

Sorry, Phon Maybe you can rediscover your passion for Oblivion in a few years´ time, or perhaps find a new one to explore

Tried again.
Inadvertantly deleted my load order file.
I am not meant to play this game again. As such I've deleted all of the binaries and all of the files again. For good I think.
I've kept the Skyrim ones but I'll probably ditch them later.
On with The Last Remnant...!

Sorry to hear that, Phon. I can really sense your frustration.

I think you may be wise to let TES things rest for a time. Enjoy Last Remnant for awhile. I hope you will stay active here and, in time, return to the TES fold. Perhaps the frustration will fade and you will feel nostalgia for the good parts about TES.

I agree with Acadian. It´s sad but apparently necessary for you to be away from the game now, it seems. But hopefully you will come back some day, passion restored

I'll revive this thread, however briefly or not so briefly, to mention that I remain undecided as to porting my long-running second play-through to the "new" PC or at some point morphing my Experimental Oblivion Build into an honest play-through. I still lean toward the former (assuming it's possible) but can't rule out the latter. Odd as it might seem to some, one point in favor of starting afresh is the chance to watch my avatar close all those Oblivion Gates again. (You might recall he closed every Gate he chanced upon, which ended up being all be a couple of them.) Those were great fun times I still remember fondly. Too, there are some mod changed I'd like to make that aren't feasible with the second play-through.

No great rush. I've still more mods to audition on the Experimental Build, and visual issues to iron out. That should keep me busy for some time.

Since there are 90 gates and you can only close 60, a fresh start is the only way to get the other 30. OCD requires you to play two games! I don't recall if any of the Oblivion quests had alternative endings, like not being able to choose both sides in Skyrim's Civil War, but the new game would be the chance to take the other path where applicable.

I resurrect this long-neglected thread to mention that, due to my ongoing Oblivion screenshot enhancement project, I've developed a mild interest in resuming my second playthrough. Its working install resides on what is now my third computer, which has sat derelict beneath my secondary computer's desk for some years. "No biggie," thought I. I have, after all, backups of the entire playthrough on the storage partition of my primary and/or secondary computers. Copies of needed C-drive USER files are also housed there. Or so I thought.

I looked through every drive partition on my primary PC; it ain't there. Ditto for my secondary PC. It's not on either of the two USB sticks I can easily find. I checked my external storage hard drive; zilch. That leaves my third computer's Oblivion install. It's there for sure.

I can't at the moment drum up the enthusiasm to reconnect that PC, since it means temporarily rendering my secondary PC unusable. Which isn't to say that I won't at some point do so, only that I'm not at this time motivated to do so.

(I don't see myself as ever starting a brand-spanking-new Oblivion playthrough. That second playthrough was so perfect in all aspects (except its mediocre graphics) that any subsequent attempt would be a pale-shadowed disappointment.)

Cool, I'm just starting to think of rebuilding my gaming computer, this time with TWO solid state drives; one for gaming, the other for other typical computer stuff such as the My Pictures, My Documents, and other Windows folders and programs, so it's perfect this thread just popped up. I forget why it was suggested I go for two drives, but I like the idea and so that's what I'm going for. Thing is, I ferking DROPPED my computers (both of them, but not at the same time. Even carrying one at a time was too much for me! ) last summer after just getting out of the hospital. Was trying to blow dust out of them but the left side of my body wasn't ready to carry even that much weight -- now, after months of PT and OT, I think it is. The home/office (non-gaming) HP I'm typing on now has a standard spinning hard drive. 500 GB I think. It survived its fall only because I dropped in some grass, I think.

But my gaming computer, I dropped right on a linoleum floor as I tried to position it on my crowded, old-fashioned gaming table. This table is so old I think it has a leather top. Anyway, I replaced its drive in August 2024 with a standard (non SSD) WD Blue drive. Got it working over a couple months, installed all my favorite games, and so on. I think it took until November of that year to get that desktop back to where it was. One thing I did RIGHT was I took a lot of notes on everything, including the reinstall of Obliviion I literally hijacked a thread started by TheCheshireKhajiit (with his permission) just so I could describe the reinstall of Oblivion piece by piece. So hopefully the process this time will be even smoother this time.

I am going to try getting Windows 10 back in place for these new drives. I missed the cutoff to buy the actual Windows 10 installation discs from Best Buy last summer/fall and I'm not interested in Win11; have heard horror stories from a friend about 11-- but thankfully I saved the link for an online 10 download here. Was able to use that link to get my gaming HP running in 2024, hope it still works this spring.

First though, I need to get some SSDs, which I'll do hopefully next week; make the actual hour-long drive to Micro Center so I can ask some techs this and that. From what I gather, one main difference between SSDs and old-fashioned hard drives is they aren't always 3.5 inch drives, and we don't have to be as strict where these SSDs wind up in the case, but I'd like to find some SSDs which are 3.5, if only because the way my case is designed, there are multiple 3.5 inch slots for drives which run top to bottom of my case-- I'll post a picture soon, when I'm ready to tear apart my gaming computer, removing its panel. I'll eat some spinach before trying to move it this time. 🌿

Your link to the MS Win10 creation-media page did me good, in that it allowed me to find a USB stick that I'd pretty much given up on as hopelessly missing. How so? Once on that media download page, I recalled that I had created a Win10 installation USB stick back when my primary computer's hidden Windows boot partition corrupted during 2023. It then dawned on me that the USB stick in question might well be stored with my several official (paid for) Windows 10 CDs. Sure enough, that's where it is.

Cool, yeah, cool. Love when our help for one another gets mutual. 🖥 Enough respect, D.