Yesterday, I installed Skyrim onto my PC.

Though today I came across some issues:

1. I cannot save games. Whenever I pause and save a game, the file is never there. Also, despite the Autosaving message appearing when I enter a new cell, the file also does not appear in the saved games menu. I only have one successful save in Whiterun.
2. When my character dies, the game does not reload, not even to my one and only successful save. I am forced to watch my character's dead body.

Thanks in advance.

There is a folder in My Documents/My Games/Skyrim/Saves

Is there anything in that folder?

Are you using the stock My Documents location or have you mapped that to a different folder?

Are you running the game as an Administrator?

I am running the game as an admin, though I'll go and check out the rest and brb.

Okay, the Skyrim folder is in the stock My Documents > My Games and I do see the other saves I made that did not appear in the game.

Turn on file extensions in the Explorer options and read off the full names.

So the saves are being made and written to the folder, but you can not access them from the Load Menu choice?

Since you have a new game, delete the INI and Prefs files in My Games/Skyrim and start the game again. It will redetect your settings so that is normal after doing this. In fact, go into Steam and Validate the local files which does the same thing (deleting the INI and Prefs files) and then start the game again.

Okay, I'll try that. Thanks!

UPDATE: I did as CCNA said and validated the cache via Steam. However, after it was done, it told me that one file failed to be validated (or something along those lines).

One file does not always validate. That's normal.

Are you running any mods? And what is the answer to post #5?

double post

I am only running the HD texture pack from Bethesda.

And as for #5:

1. .ess.bak
2. .ess.tmp
3. .ess.bak
4. .ess.tmp
5. .ess.bak.
6. .ess.tmp
7. .ess
8. .ess
9. .ess.tmp
10. .ess.tmp
11. .ess.tmp
12. .ess.tmp

#1-6 are autosaves

#7 is Helgen

#8 -12 are the ones I made

By the way, I have not had the opportunity to restart my game since validating the cache.

Bingo.

Try renaming the ones with the .tmp extensions to remove the everything after the ".ess" part.

Won't fix the issue but it will tell us if the game is actually saving the data so we can go from there.