dark soul will not create save to hdd

I was going to start a new game after deleting my old one and everything work fine until I quit then it said my save was corrupt so I deleted save from harddrive and now it gets stuck creating save. It will save on a flash drive and also with a different
account. so its a problem with my account + harddrive and I'm not sure what to do. the console I'm on is 360

:)

 

Dark Souls 2 - Failed to create save data

So I have the old white version of the 360, which apparently still works but I'm guessing it's (or at least the hard drive?) on its last legs. I have on occasions seen the E68 error on my xbox, which disappears when I reboot the thing. However, as I started
playing Dark Souls 2 on release day, things have gone pear shaped a bit.

When my character was about level 50, the first disaster happened. The game suddenly told me it couldn't save and was quitting to main menu, which upon rebooting told me my save data was corrupt, but at least the save data was still there when I went into
system > storage/memory. And because I refused to believe it would simply corrupt without me doing anything wrong, I kept loading and reloading and after about 7 tries, it came back to life and the save data started loading like there was no hiccup whatsoever.
When my character reached level 80, a new disaster happened, seemingly with the same random trigger. Failing to save, quitting to main menu and proceeded to hang. After a forced reboot, the save data is no longer there - it had simply disappeared as if I had
deleted the save, which I obviously didn't.

Now every time I try to start Dark Souls 2, it will attempt to load the save data, of which there is none, and upon failing it reads 'failed to create save data' and brings me back to main menu. And I don't even have the option to start a new game, which
basically renders my Dark Souls 2 disc useless. I have cleared cache once, which obviously didn't help. I'm guessing the hard drive is failing/has failed and that last hang was catastrophic and somehow destroyed my save data? Thing is though, it still boots
up and I can still play other games, apparently just not the game I want to finish.

Is there anything I can do to fix this? Obviously there is no more warranty given how old my 360 is - so I'm sort of drawing a blank as to how to fix this and/or abandoning all hope to ever complete Dark Souls 2.

 

Dark Souls 2 - Failed to create save data

try transferring the save you do have to a usb then try playing off the usb instead of hard drive