Hello, I've been playing Elder Scrolls games since 2004 ish (though I watched my dad play Daggerfall before then), but this is the first time I haven't been able to fix a problem with a simple search. I'm also writing this from my phone because I don't have internet here, so I apologize for any autocorrect fails I miss.

Anyway, I reinstalled Oblivion a couple months ago, and I've been running it no problem since then. The occasion crash, but nothing to bothersome. Last week, I quick saved and left it paused for a bit when the power went out on the block. I left my computer off for the holiday, and just got back to it today.

Now, it is crashing every few minutes, and after a few reloads, I got the message "This save relies on content that is no longer present..." Only I hadn't changed anything between reloads! I also started a new character to see if that would help, but the second my Altmer started looking good and I actually got a little excited about starting from scratch, it crashed again.

I am running the goty disc on my beast of an hp Blackbird with Windows 7, 2.66ghz quad core cpu, 2gb ram, and ati radeon hd 3870 (my computer seems to be saying there are two of those, if that's a thing). It is installed in my Games folder.

I have every dlc except battlehorn, bab, beautiful women and handsome gents (with improved facial textures and enayla's ft), change your face, harvest containers and flora, intelligence overhaul (though none of those are checked off), leviathan soul gems, quest award leveler, smarter mercantile leveling (which I was to lazy to remove), unique landscapes compilation 1.3.2, and wp health regen. I also use the unofficial patches, though closer inspection shows I do not have the one for Shivering Isles.

I'm hoping I overlooked something really simple, and I won't have to reinstall. It played fine before the power outage. I used to play with a lot more mods, too, but I mostly wanted to do this play through for the lore.

Well, quick saves and auto saves are known to lead to savegame corruption, so in general I would recommend making full saves, either through the console or by pressing escape and makign a save.

But you say you cannot start a new game either, so this is not just a problem with the saves.

From what you are describing, it kind of sounds like something might have gotten out of order or deactivated, although I have no idea how a power outage could deactivate a mod or change the modified date of an esp file.

If you haven't already, you might check to make sure all of your mods are activated and in the right load order. Do you use OBMM or Wrye Bash? It would be easy to check your load order with one of those utilities.

That's about all I can suggest. Good luck, I hope you figure it out.

Edit: How is your computer running otherwise? I hope the power outage did not damage any of your hardware, but that could be another explanation for the crashes if there was a power surge that damaged your graphics card for isntance.

Thank you! Yes, I did have several regular saves, and they are all coming up with the same message. I'll double check which mods are supposed to be where and make sure they're where they need to be. I was careful when I installed them, but I'm also prone to making mistakes. And I guess my next step is trying out all my other big games to see if something got fried. I was hoping this wouldn't be an expensive problem...

I don't know if this would cause the crashes but because of the power outage, you might want to scan your hard drive for errors and bad sectors. Just run CHKDSK on it. It'll probably ask you to reboot the computer, click yes.

Sometimes with a power outage, the hard drive will get file system errors on it, and occasionally maybe a bad sector.