Hi all,

I just wanted to pass something along I discovered and solved last night while playing New Vegas on the 360. It is hopefully a workaround to game saves not loading after another save of yours has corrupted.

For me, I have way too much faith in my saves than I should, and prior to last night, kept one manual save, and the one auto save file. Upon exiting an area, my game got stuck on a black screen, but the music kept playing. I powered down the Xbox like I would with any other freeze I have in the game, and upon reloading, I discovered my Auto-save file was corrupted. (Likely because the game froze at a bad time where my auto save was processing). So, I was left with my one manual save, which seemed to be in-tact.

However, upon loading this game save, I could not leave the loading screen. The game would keep loading, and keep cycling through different background images and hints. I let it go for 3-5 min. and still nothing. At this point, I was worried that all of my progress would be lost forever. I tried to restart the xbox, but no luck. I was starting to accept the fact I would be done with New Vegas (no way I could restart). I wondered if maybe my manual save somehow got corrupted too just because of the fact that the Xbox got powered off during ANY save, even if it wasn't for that file.

However, I tried one last hail mary that consisted of 4 different things. Since I did them all at the same time, I cannot be sure which of these or which combination of these solved the problem, but heres what I did:

1.) I COPIED my only good save file onto a flash drive
2.) I DELETED the Corrupted auto-save file from my hard drive
3.) I CLEARED THE SYSTEM CACHE on my hard drive. (Select drive, press Y)
4.) I LOADED the save game from my FLASH DRIVE.

The load seemed to be longer than usual (guessing it was cause of the flash drive), and I was about to lose all hope, when all of a sudden my game popped back. Boy was I relieved!! So now I keep multiple save files as I go (normally 2-3 + the auto save) and recommend doing the same, especially with the sheer amount of bugs New Vegas has. I also may occasionally put a save on my flash drive as a backup.

However, If someone else ever has or has had this problem, I hope that this is something people can replicate to be able to prevent them from losing all of their game progress like I almost did.
-AHX