I just bought this game and downloaded from Steam a week ago. I have it installed on my 2nd ssd, as my C drive was completely full. It did run at first, but all I'd done is created two character & not gotten past the first scene. My daughter then played th e game for about 2 hours. Some time later that same night I attempted to play & it ctd'd right after the Bethesda title screen, it shows the Skyrim icon for a millisecond and that's it.

I've tried all of the recommended fixes, (msconfig-shutting off all startup items, run as admin, downloading drivers, running service pack 2, verifying files, reinstalled Steam & all games etc, etc, ) No change. It just crashes after the initial Bethesda screen every time!!

I'm running an i7-2600k 16 gb ram, radeon 6850 1 gb. Windows 7 Pro 64 bit, Photoshop, LR, Canon Printer.
If there is anyone that could suggest something that I could do, that would be great. I'm willing to try overc locking, software tweaks, whatever might work. Thanks

The drive where you install Steam is not the place the saved games are kept. They are kept in a subdirectory under your "My documents --> My games." If you installed Windows on C, then this will be on C also, unless you moved it properly. Sounds like it quickly filled your C drive and since it is full it is crashing on saves including autosaves.

FYI you should never completely fill a logical (physical) drive, it needs a bit of room for defrag (or TRIM functions on SSDs) and superfetch to function, not to mention the recycle bin and Windows restore info.

If my understanding is right, you COULD make a Symbolic Directory Link between \My Documents\My Games\Skyrim and a directory on your secondary hard-drive (SSD). This would allow the saves to work correctly, but not use up space on the C:\ drive.

For this to work correctly you would have to manually move files in the My Documents\My Games\Skyrim directory to the SSD, and then make the Symbolic Link from that path back to My Documents\My Games\Skyrim.

In cmd it would be something like this, where D:\ is the SSD, and you created a SkyrimSaves directory on the D:\ drive.

mklink /D D:\SkyrimSaves %userprofile%\My Documents\My Games\Skyrim

However, HalloweenWeed is right, you should never completely fill a hard drive. I recommend that you have at least 10% free space on a hard drive.

Although that is technically correct, the "My Documents" folder is a specially handled folder to Windows, and it may cause some undesirable consequences. The correct manner is to navigate to your user directory (usually C:\Users\%username%) then Rclick on My Documents and select "properties", select the "location" tab, click the "move" button, and navigate to the directory you want it moved to (make a "My Documents" directory somewhere on your other drive first). Then when it asks you if you want to move the present contents, say yes. This is the official Microsoft-supported method of moving the "My Documents" location.

I have been using this method for a few years now, ever since I upgraded to Win7, and I can say I have had zero issues with it (I have an SSD for boot OS).

Ah I didn't know you could simply move the My Documents directory altogether. Granted, the symbolic link would only be the Skyrim directory inside My Documents, not the entire directory.