Dani, the basic process works, at least for me. I don't use FCOM but I do use Frans and MMM (although I'm a bit behind on MMM right now). Plus other stuff, of course.

However, I would advise that you always have a copy of the initial install without any changes, INCLUDING the .ini file. Also, once you make changes (mods and ini) always have duplicate backups of the .ini with different tweaks you are testing, even simple changes. You don't have to do each change as a backup, but I have a couple as I tweaked things with my current install on the laptop I bought last winter.

This is the reason I haven't gone to the most recent Bash releases with BAIN, too. I use 187 and just do not have the time to upgrade, doing packages and (more importantly for an upgrade for me) redoing my replacers as packages. As it was, I had to do additional tweaks to get Oblivion to run properly on the new laptop, mostly related to sound issues causing lag and crashes. This is not something that is readily apparent and it took a long time to figure out the cause. I never had the problem on my old desktop, of course, because each computer is different and may behave differently even if the general specs are equal or better. This laptop is powerful, but obviously Oblivion has an odd interaction with the sound card to cause these types of problems (other games don't do this, of course). It's very much the same types of problems that people used to see on desktops and why the Quiet Feet mod and various .ini sound tweaks were created.

Anyway, it's feasible, but it's good to have mutliple sources to draw upon and simply copying from one place to another may or may not work. It would still save time, as it did for me, but tweaking may be required.

Also, you may want to check out Tom Long's POSitive site about using BAIN and backing up/restoring installs. Info about how to do it is supposed to be on the site, although I have not checked it out personally (yet).

I believe I cringed a little bit after reading your story. I can't imagine working an entire year on something and then having it just....destroyed. Geez....that's sounds unbearable :dead:

Also....what is the "A-bomb"? I apologize but my PS3 lingo is very limited. Is this the equivalent to the Red Ring of Death for the 360? Is it something I need to worry about? I play Oblivion on the 360 as well as the PS3 (though I spend most of my time on the 360). My biggest scare wasn't very scary.... My 360 started flashing red (I was actually playing my main Oblivion account when it happened) and every time I'd restart it, it would only last a few minutes before dying again. I ended up buying a new one and realized that my old hard drive was not harmed. I was able to connect my old hard drive to my new Xbox like nothing ever happened. It just set me back about $400

It's actually not a PS3 problem, it happens on all platforms. Here's an explanation from the Wrye Bash readme (which fixes it on the PC):

? "Abomb Animation Slowing" is a slowing a of animations that typically appears around 225 hours into the game (though it may occur earlier or later). Effects are that many animations (spell effects, burning fires, opening/closing doors) have noticeably stop action effects, even while the rest of the scene is rendered normally. In fact the problem is worse in areas with high frame rates (e.g., simple interiors). This is presumably a bug with the game engine, probably something with thread prioritization for animations.

? The trigger for animation slowing seems to be the last four bytes of the TesClass data chunk in the save file. These bytes apparently represent a float value, which increments steadily with game play (on my machine advancing at about 2/3 of game seconds played). When the counter crosses a certain threshold (0x49000000), the animation slowing kicks in suddenly. The fix seems to be to simply reset this counter to an early value (0.0 would probably work. I use 8.0 or 0x41000000).

? There have been some reports of related problems with animations (dying wraiths not dropping properly) and physics collisions. Also, some have reported problems showing up before 0x49000000. However, there is clearly a substantial change as the counter crosses 0x490000, and the reported physics problems have been seen earlier in the game and so may be unrelated.

With the A-Bomb bug, when you see the butterfulies suddenly freeze in midair, you know it has occurred. (true story)

Oh dear. That's no fun. Good thing I never seem to stay on one character for too long anyways. :rolleyes:

I had a hard drive failure recently and lost the mod I'd been working on. Hundreds of hours. I also lost my current game, of course. I actually spent the money to get the drive recovered (it costs thousands guys, so do backups if you care about your data). Anyway I also took the opportunity to do a couple of minor upgrades to my machine (better and more RAM and a new video card) and moved to Windows 7.

Guess what? I got my mod back. I had also made lots of notes when I had installed Oblivion previously - I had written down all the mods I wanted to install and figured out the correct install order. I redid all this under Windows 7. I was actually able to reload my saved games from the previous install under Windows XP!!! So miracles do happen.

So Dani, as you redo your install, I suggest you have some way to document the list of mods you want to install and the order you have to install them in. Especially an FCOM install. You can get suggestions from all kinds of places, as you well know, but only you know the exact list of mods you want to install and ultimately how they are going to interact with one another. Once you have a basic list, then you can revise that as you decide which mods you like and don't like.

I usually list out the load order from Wrye and write in the installation order using numbers next to each mod. I've adopted http://www.tesivpositive.animolious.com/?page=installing_mods, so a mod will have something like 7/3 next to it. This means it's a group 7 mod and it should be installed third in that group. This really helps when you need to reinstall.

I only take backups of my data directory when I'm about to install a mod I'm not sure about. Otherwise I don't keep a backup around because #1 I do modding myself, so I'm always messing with the data directory and #2 because the installation order really matters with my mod list, so even if I had a backup, it would probably be of limited use because I'd find that there's a mod I want to install that actually has to be inserted into the middle of my install order...

So, crap happens, but there are ways to cut down on the recover time... hth!

Wrye Bash. Enough Said.

you know you can call the xbox guys and they take your xbox on your door repair it(if they can't they give you a new one) give it back to you on the door and everything for free!

I had animation problems recently, to be specific my khajiit characters tail didn't animate properly. I ran the Wrye Bash A-bomb fix and it seems it worked, however i've only played some 100 hours, and WB said the counter was only 49% full :huh: (I made a thread about this same thing in tech support section about a year ago, but no one knew what was up then.)

Also i seem to have some permanent crash zone west of Skingrad, i'd like to avoid fast tarveling, but enetering the area of tamriel between middle of Skingrad and Meridia's shrine causes an instant CTD :swear:

Still, it works otherwise, and i'm not keen on making any changes that compromise my 100h caharcter progress

With regards to the A-Bomb glitch, does it/ did it even happen to anyone who doesn't have Shivering Isles installed?


That very much sounds like a mod conflict/ problem. I recommend disabling half of your mods to find out which half are the one that could be causing them. Once you find out which half, disable half of those, etc, until you find the single mod that's causing you the grief. Of course that method works best if you can cause the CTD shortly after loading your save, once you move into the area you mentioned. If you disable half the mods and you don't get anymore consistent CTDs in that area, then the problem mod lies in the half that you already disabled, etc. Basic process of elimination.


From what I've heard most of those problems were caused by XBox360's graphics processor over heating due to the fan cooler/ heatsink being installed incorrectly. As Proguy mentions, you should have Microsoft replace it for you under warranty.

I've had that CTD with plenty of different mod load orders. I just use fast travel to skip over the area, after all there's nothing important there.

i bumped my bowl of beloved gems. place looks like a saphire golem exploded. not the worst, but i certainly didnt like it.

my worst was getting stuck in something, the wall, a pillar, a door, happens alot, since everytime it happens i have a save thats 3 hours old...

My worst day of Oblivion was my first day of Oblivion. My old video card was having issues with the game, so that added a few hundred dollars to the pricetag. The new card runs the game really well, however I needed to upgrade it, anyways, due to the rest of my PC having been far superior to the video card itself...




Do you have COBL Salmo the Baker? I'm not sure if this has been fixed, but I had this issue a while back.

Next time you reinstall (or now, if you are happy with your current compilation, and you can afford the disk space):

1. Make a backup of your load order with OBMM.
2. Make a copy of your Oblivion directory in the same folder that it is (so there are two folders: "\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion" and "\Bethesda Softworks\Copy of Oblivion"). Next time you need to reinstall, just erase the "Oblivion" folder, rename "Copy of Oblivion" to "Oblivion", and do again the copy.

That's how I do it, and I've gone from having to reinstall a hundred of mods every time I reinstall, to install 6 or 7, all of them character-dependant.

No, i do use COBL, but not that plugin. And i had this CTD with load orders before i started including COBL. The CTD is so reliable i have stopped thinking it as a bug, but a feature instead :lmao: