I installed Skyrim to my memory stick for the 360. Played all weekend with it. Got home from work, my son played Skyrim with the memory stick, and then when it was my turn, it was gone. WTF?! So how can all the info, my saved games, the install of Skyrim and the formatting be gone?

When I put in the memory stick, and go to settings and Memory to see what was on there, it asks to configure it. So now I am reconfigured it for the 360, and reinstalling Skyrim on it again. So what caused me to loose everything? My son swears he didn't do anything to it. He doesn't even know how to wipe it clean, heck I don't even know how to wipe it clean.

So what could have happened? I am not so sure Skyrim could do this, but seeing how Skyrim seems to be screwy and some people claim thier console or PC doesn't work after playing Skyrim, I am not so sure now.

Can anyone help me? If this is not a Skyrim problem what could have went wrong?

It's happened to me with USB sticks. I don't think the problem is skyrim.

If you are installing to a USB stick its best to still save the game to your HDD.

Maybe your USB drive couldn't take the strain of being constantly read so crashed and wiped itself.

So best to keep saves on the HDD in case the USB drive crashes again.

I have read on this section about a similar glitch.
Someones game froze when he died in the middle of a transformation to werewolf and when he rebooted he had lost all his saves.

This seems to be a very serious bug.

Im afraid that now you have reconfigured your usb your saves are probably lost forever.

Until there is a patch it may be a good idea to store a backup savegame on a seperate stick.

It is what I am going to do right now.

Edit: to poster above:
I have a low grade model xbox and only 500mb memory on it total.
I must save on usb :/

Is it possible at all that someone dropped it in a PC and somehow it got formatted back to PC state(NTSC, FAT32, etc)?

Thats fair enough but personally if i were in the same situation as you and i installed the game to USB I would get a second usb drive just for the saves.

I've had a USB stick mysteriously wipe itself in the past when playing fallout 3 installed to it. The game froze then everything was gone off the drive.

Oh, I havent got the game installed on it.
I read on this forum about glitches that may pop up when you do.

But for a game like Skyrim I keep a lot of saves and I put those on the USB-stick.
And as of today I keep one save daily on a seperate one.

Just out of curiousity.

If you don't have the game installed and you don't have a HDD then that means the game isn't caching at all.
Do you have the texture bug?

Lawl, this exact situation happened to me. Game freezes, i reboot, everything!!! is gone ( hard drive AND USB stick wiped 100% clean) The best part is that i only bought a USB stick because this game's ridiculous load times were making me suicidal and i don't have a large enough hard drive to install. i can't even begin to comprehend how my hard drive was wiped clean when i was playing from the USB....

No it's not possible. My son had it in his Xbox. Thing is he played Skyrim, but can't say if it was off the USB or Disk. What I will try now, is play of USB again (this time nobody is playing off it for now) and will only be on my 360 and see what happens. I will make a back up save on my HDD.

Is it possible to play off the USB, but save to the HDD? If so, how do you do this?