Halo 3 Not Saving at all!?

[Fideon]

I purchased Halo 3 a few weeks ago and in the begining I had The Xbox Arcade version which as you know it only comse with a Memory Card, I tried to play over the Start Solo Game option but I noticed that when i quit to menu it didnt show me any resume option, but in the campaign lobby it does show the levels I played then I quit to the dashboard and when I run Halo 3 again theres nothing as if i had never played not even levels in campaing, I remember that I read in the back of the halo 3 box that it said Optimized for hard drive or something like that, so I thought that I needed to buy a hard drive in order to save, So I just bought a 20gb halo 3 version HDD and even with the HDD I cant save any progress! The hard drive does work bcuz I copied some game saves to it, Halo 3 doesnt save my campaign progress, appearance, films, screenshots, it just shows the temporary films at theater but I cant save them, it shows a cannot save film to storage device message, Forge gives me no option to save a custom map, in the end, it doesnt save anything at all! I havent logged in to LIVE and I have read the delete your profile-recover gametag option I´ll try it out since im finally getting internet this week, but well if anyone can tell me if they are having this same problem and waht you did to fix it, ill update if the recover gametag thing works. Thanks!