TLDR at bottom
So I'm roadtripping with my family, so I'm on my laptop, which can't handle much in the way of current games, so I decided to make sure Mass Effect 1 and 2 would work on it. They were still installed from forever ago, so I ran them both to ensure they were working, everything is golden. ME1 loaded into an old save (from like a year ago) and had access to all of my original saves (from like 2 years ago) I didn't check ME2 specific saves, but I figured ME1 is fine, ME2 should be good too. On the trip, I'm offline, because we're driving around, and my last save file wasn't something I was particularly in the mood to play (It was a vanguard, focused primarily on running up like a Krogan and shotgunning) so I started a new one, made it an engineer. Played through for a few hours, all is well, my laptop battery is getting low, so I close out and power down. A few days later, I decide to start cleaning some junk files off my computer, some media projects I'd finished on my desktop, some backups I'd already transferred to an external hard drive, stuff like that, and I decide to uninstall the sims, because I've never played it, only installed it for my girlfriend to play whenever she didn't have access to her computers. I also uninstall a bunch off other games I don't play, and some media programs I'd rather use my desktop for (the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite) just to free up some room. Well, then I go to load in mass effect, and it's acting like I don't have any of my saves. So I'm immediately crestfallen because I've got like 100 hours put into those old saves already. I decide "oh well, it's a great game series, I guess I'll just replay it from scratch." Which was fine, made a new char, put about 3 hours into (finished my first round on the Citadel) and then I go to bed. Load it up the next morning, and it has access to only the save file I made while offline in the car. Not the one from the night before, and none of the old ones. So at this point I go looking around, find all of the save files I've ever made (basically found the save folder, just surprised it had all of my old saves) so then I go trolling the internet, see somebody saying how Bioware made two folders in their documents, and they just had to copy the saves from one folder to the other, so I try searching my hard drive, find another Bioware folder, see Mass Effect in it, and I copy over all of the old saves. My game then crashes and refuses to load at all, so I do an uninstall-reinstall, still only getting the one save that was offline, so now I'm here. Any clue on what is wrong? everywhere there's a Bioware>MassEffect>Save folder structure, I've made sure it has all of the old save files, I just don't know how to get ME1 to actually register them and access them.
TLDR;
Went roadtripping, so offline, played my most recent old save, didn't like it, made a new one.
Laptop dies
Few days later, I clear junk files off my laptop, nothing that should've affect ME from my experience
Go to play ME, it loads up like there's no saves
Immediate response: "* I must've cleared all my old saves"
Start up a new save file
Play for a few hours
Turn it off for the night
Load it up next morning, click resume, it loads the old save that I didn't like and that's it. No new save from the few days before, no old save where I'd actually beaten the game.
Went looking, found all of my save files, found a forum online that said to make sure every instance of Bioware>MassEffect>Save has all of the files in it, so I copy everything over
Load ME, game doesn't get past the first BioWare screen, an error pops up in the background saying some files are missing
Uninstall-Reinstall of ME1
Still only loads the save I didn't like
Any advice?
