Hello all,

For the past 2 years or so, I have not been able to play my copy of Oblivion because it would not even install. I've been off and on the board about this problem for awhile now, but I wanted to try a last time to see what I would get.

Whenever I would try to install Oblivion, I would not even get 1/4th in now, when I would recieve an error and the it would freeze up telling me about some corruption I believe.

I would go to check to see if I could access any of my Data.cabs files on the CD, and essentially I am told they are damaged or cannot be read.


(For further detail if needed, here is a screenshot:)
[img]http://i54.tinypic.com/spucyd.png[/img]



This all happened after some stupid mistakes I made with my system, and I had to do a fresh system restore, at least 2 times, while trying to restore Oblivion. I dunno if my computer scratched it up or I accidently caused some type of error, but this happens on my laptop as well, past the starting incidence of this error on my desktop.


Is there anything I can do to remedy this? I have been told that I should get a surface clean of the CD as that may be the problem, but I have been skeptical since my disc has hardly any scratches on it, and I am not sure how much damage in this case can be attributed to the data.cabs not being able to be opened. (If that should be possible at all.)


If there is nothing I can do to save this CD, does anyone think that I could e-mail Bethesda about receiving compensation, if that were even possible? If I needed just the cab. files, do you think they would send them to me? That may be a long shot, but it's worth asking. All help is appreciated!


Skyrim made me realize how far off I have been in this beautiful series, haha.

Clean the disk. If it is badly scratched, you might be able to get it polished at a video store.

Do you know if there is a specific type of technique used to do this, or is it just like a regular CD buff?

same thing so far as I know. only difference between CD, and DVD, is data density.

Ok then guys, thanks for the help. When I have the time, i'll just go ahead and do this and hope for the best. Thanks guys! i'll try to post results somewhere here when the deed is done.

The cabinet (.cab) format that the game uses is different from the .cab format winrar uses so you get that error - you can open the .cab file using the http://filehippo.com/download_universal_extractor/ - but that will not help get them installed.