I apologise if this is a stupid question but I'm new to gaming and all my googling seems to result in very diverse problems not related to mine.

I bought a second hand playstation 3 and a copy of skyrim today. It's the 160gb playstation 3 if that matters..

I had originally started playing skyrim in april at a friends house - I made a character, got really into the game but exams kicked in so never continued.

My friend put the savefile on a usb for me so today i tried to upload that to my ps3. I could play it but not save. I googled this and this seems to be the usual situation where i'd need to associate the game with my playstation account or something like that to fix it.. I didn't really understand so I kind of accepted that wouldn't be working.

I decided I'd just start a new game and start from scratch. I played up until you get to riverwood and I was really tired so I think once it had autosaved I logged out. I knew I was meant to download some patch so I set that up and downloaded the patch for skyrim.

Now a fe hours later I log in to play and it won't let me save on top of my progress from earlier. I thought it was my fault for not setting a proper save slot (all i can see is the old one from April) so I started YET ANOTHER new game. Spent ages designing my character etc. I noticed there was no save option available in the system menu (everything in the system menu is greyed out). I thought maybe it was because I was in an opening sequence.

I'm just after finishing unbound, i got the trophy (it didn't give me the trophy in yesterdays game). But I still can't save. I don't even see an option for making a new save slot.

Does this mean my skyrim will never let me start a new save slot?

Do I have to delete the old one?

Do I have to start yet another new game?

Any help would be really appreciated, I don't know where to begin trying to figure this out.