ok i was working on a huge mod, i had already done a tremendous amount of work in it, but now the damn .esp is gone, it shows up in the CS and on the data files menu on the launcher but its not in the Data files folder, i have show hidden folders turned on also, and another of my mods did the same thing, it just disappeared from the data files folder. how do i find them?

this game is really getting on my nerves lately :swear:

I don't think it's the game, I think it's your OS doing the shenanigans. Just a guess, but you have Vista or Win7 and installed Morrowind to the default location under Program Files, and the OS doesn't like to see files get written to Program Files any more, so it has stashed them away under your Appdata directory somewhere.

Seems to me the best solution is to install Morrowind outside of Program Files somewhere so the OS doesn't try to do mysterious things.

yeah all its creating is shortcuts in the appdata folder, i wont even create an .esp, ive tried saving it under multiple names, and in different locations, i tried saving it in the c drive, in different folders, in the downloads folder under my user name, it wont save an .esp anywhere. its like it just creates a shortcut for it, but the .esp still works in the CS and in-game. When i search my computer for the file it only shows a shortcut, and it says that the address isnt valid when i click it.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/781497-vistawindows-7-problems/page__p__12113679&#entry12113679 is from the HW/SW forum, and it tells how to find Save games under Vista/Win7, maybe finding your plugins will be similar.

I may be wrong but that sounds like hard drive problems. Files shouldn't just be disappearing from your directory. But that will happen if your hard drive is too full and either your directory is being over written or if one program is running out of space and overwriting another program or if your hard drive is not set to safe write while it is saving a file and the computer is turned off while the hard drive is updating it's directory. I'd check your hard drive to see how much space it still has on it. Then I'd run a hard drive check to verify that all of the files are ok. Do that with the option to have it fix the bad files it finds turned off first. It will give you a report telling you if you have errors on your hard drive. If there are errors then back up everything you want to keep on a second hard drive. Then run the hard drive check again with the option to fix files turned on. Have your handkerchief ready because some of the files may have been repaired incomplete. That's why you always back things up on another hard drive first. Defrag the hard drive. Go into system devices and set the hard drive for safe writes if it isn't already set that way. That will keep your hard drive from messing up your files if the computer shuts down before the hard drive has finished updating it's information. Check the size of your paging file. The minimum size may need to be set higher for game use. I don't trust Windows to automatically set the paging file to the right size. I'm guessing that you have the game on a pc instead of a consol. If I'm wrong then I just wasted your time. Hehehe. I hope this helps.

thats probably not the problem i have almost 50gb of space on my hard drive. so it shouldnt be overwriting anything.

:bowdown:

this worked....i never thought to check it that way
theres like 15 esp's in there from my frantic" try and save it as another name" attempts haha

thank you so much, you saved me about 24+ hours of work.