Xbox 360 Dawnguard DLC - Chasing Echoes bug

I've been playing through the Dawnguard DLC on the side of the dawnguard, and duting the Chasing Echoes quest, you must enter a portal to Soul Cairn.

What is SUPPOSED to happen is that you try to enter the portal, your character loses health and cannot enter, then you speak to Serana and she will either make you a vampire lord or soul trap you, and you can then enter the portal.

However, when I played it, Serana opened the portal up fine, but then when I even got near the portal my characters would die instantly. I am still having this issue after reloading the save many times - I do have a back-up save, but I already tried using it and when I got back to the same point in the questline, the same thing happened.


What can I do to fix this? Any help greatly appreciated.

Which part did you choose? Soul trap or let her turn you into a vampire?

You are given the choice after you walk near the portal and take a little damage - whenever I walk near the portal, I die instantly. I haven't been able to make the choice yet.

Go turn yourself into an ordinary vampire maybe? You will have to cure yourself b4 doing any more DG missions but at least you MAY be able to proceed with the story...

How do I turn myself into an ordinary vampire? And should I return immediately to this quest?
I guess it could work.

You can get vampirism from a vampire using 'drain life' spell on you. It may take awhile but get into a fight with a vampire and after awhile a message will come up saying you have contracted Sanguinare Vampiris (you can also view it in the Active Effects part of your magic menu). 3days later you will be a fully fledged vampire.

Im not sure if this will fix your problem as I have not had this bug happen to me , but its worth a shot...

Okay, so I tried to do the "Purity" quests to cure Farkas, Vilkas and eventually myself of Lycanthropy, so that I could lose my immunity to disease and become vampire - however, as soon as I started the quest, I would leave Jorrvaskr to lose Vilkas as a follower and the quest then marked itself as complete, but it said the objective had not been fulfilled. I tried to start the quest again, and it did start, but the game kept saying I already had a follower and so I couldn't get Vilkas to follow me.

So basically, I've found a glitch while trying to find away around another glitch.
I've kind of given up now, this game hates me.

Jeez dude, that sucks...

My game isnt that glitchy at all so I dont really know what you can do. Maybe just start a new character and hope that it was the save file that was so glitchy?

I really don't want to lose this character though.

I'm going to try and get around the Vilkas bug, but then if being a vampire doesn't solve my initial problem then I'm screwed.

EDIT: Got around the bug and "cured" myself from lycanthropy - I am no longer able to enter beast form, but I still have the 100% resistance to disease so I can't become a vampire? I don't even know.

UPDATE: Solved my issue!

I couldn't find any fix around the bugs I encountered, so I copied the save onto my PC, converted it to .ess and ran it on the PC version of Skyrim, with the DLC.

I then typed "setstage DLC1VQ04 100", which moved the quest forward.

After getting the save back on my XBOX 350, problem solved!