After 40+ hours of Dark Souls my game crashed on me. I restarted my system and tried to load my save up only for the game to freeze as soon as I try to do so.

This happens every single time!

It's not the system, every other game works fine. The game isn't scratched, it is simply the save data won't load anymore.

And this is not cool.

I've had a look around the internet and it seems pretty common among people who didn't quit out via the menu, but I see no sign of a fix - just people saying "I started a new character" or "I traded the game in" etc.

I posted on the Dark Souls official forums yesterday but the moderator needs to approve it and they either haven't logged on in over a day or the rejected my post because it shines a bad light on the game.

I just thought I'd post here on the off chance that SOMEONE knows how to fix this or has any information on it. Even if the developers acknowledged it and said there was an incoming fix I'd be happy! But I can't see anything of the sort.

SAD FACE!

INFO!?

My latest attempt went something like this: 
 
My save is on the XBOX hard drive, so I thought "okay I'll just double check that it REALLY is the save data that's not working by starting a new game from a new save in ANOTHER location. So, I chose a different save location, and started a new game. Made a some random male character, whatever stats etc, and jumped in. The game worked fine. 
 
I then switched the game off, deleted that save that I just created (even though it was on another hard drive, I thought I'd just get rid of it) and loaded the game back up, choosing my original hard drive with the original broken save file on it. What happened then...was fookin messed up and stupid and bizarre! Instead of loading my level 67 dude from Anor Londo, instead of not loading at all because it was broken, instead of SOMEHOW loading that new male character I just created on another hard drive, instead of all these things it went straight to the game credits, then loaded me into the start of the game as some totally random I-never-created-her-ever female character at level 0 and all her stats at 0.
 
And now my original character is gone forever. Level 67. Over 40 hours. Vanished. 
 
Dark Souls sucks.

Its not you or the hard drive the only thing wrong with it is Anor Londo, it my be one of the updates for the game but i cant load my character at all from there and i even bought a new game from the store to fix the problem thinking its just a scratch but i still cant load my character so yea... its pretty stupid...

Sorry for the loss, but now it means you can play the game again! The game has great replay-value.