I first bought FO3 about a year ago and had good time without any DLCs. Here six months or so ago I bought and installed the GOTY, and have been playing nothing but FO3 this summer. IIRC, when I installed the GOTY, I was basically able to skip the 1st disk, and just install the DLC.

That way, I didn't have to reinstall any mods I guess. (FOMM, CALIBR. CRAFT, slower leveling). Never had any problems playing the game via the FOMM startup icon, and it never asked for any disk to be in the drive.

This morning it was clear my vid card was dead, so I took her in to Best Buy and they put a new power supply and vid card in for me. OS and the HD were untouched, except I'm guessing they must have installed the drivers for the new Radeon video card. I also bought Witcher 2 and installed it first thing when I got home.

Having installed Witcher 2 I flipped it on a bit just to get a feel for it, and decided I wasn't in the mood. And decided to play a bit of FO3 before bed.

I got some error message asking me to put the "original CD" in the drive. I put my Disc 1 and Disc 2 from my GOTY copy in the drive and told it to retry but no luck. Maybe it wants the FO3 disk that I originally used to install the game a year or more ago? I must have that disk around here somewhere, and will look if I need to.

Anyway, it just struck me as weird that it did this. I don't ever recall the game asking me to have a disk installed to play it before this. I suppose it might have something to do with the new Video card being installed?

Appreciate any advice or sugestions. Not a big deal, and I'm sure I'll get it worked out soon enough, but tonight I'm winding down

So I got the game running via the auto-run window that comes open when I insert my disk. Most all the menu options from my mods are showing up (Wasteland Explorer; CRAFT option when at a workbench, etc.).

However, the Motorcycle Fuel CRAFT button doesn't work. My portable grill and portable water filter (I think this are part of the CRAFT mod?) aren't working. My sprint key isn't working either.

Seems like maybe some of my mods got 'uninstalled' when the new power supply and video card got installed?

I seem to recall these is an app called FOSE (Fallout Script Extender) that most of these mods need to run. I guess maybe that is where the problem is, and the game would NOT start from the FOMM shortcut icon (the one that I've habitually used for months to startup the game) because FOSE somehow got disabled by the new power supply and vid card getting installed?

Any help or advice is appreciated.

ADDIT: well, now it all seems to be working fine. Using the fose_loader icon in my Bethesda/Fallout 3 folder (and with my GOTY disk 1 in the drive), game started up no problem, and all the mod features seem to be working. FOMM icon in the same folder also worked.

So, I just deleted my old FOMM shortcut on my desktop and created a new one. Maybe for some reason the first time the game loads it needs to disk in the drive, and since it had new power source and hardware installed it thought it was the first time.

Problem seems to be 'fixed' but if anyone has any insight into why this happened I'd appreciate hearing.