How do I launch Skyrim in fullscreen mode on a secondary monitor?
Sorry to bring up an old post, I write this only so if anyone else has this problem in the future at least the answer is out here, I found that the problem happens when two lines are not in both the Skyrim.ini and the SkyrimPrefs.ini and those lines are:
iAdapter=1
sD3DDevice="Your Graphic Card Name Goes Here"
normally they will be in the SkyrimPrefs.ini but not in the Skyrim.ini so just copy them over and your game will launch on your second monitor like you want. They go under the [Display]
iAdapter=0 "Default Monitor"
iAdapter=1 "Second Monitor"
iAdapter=2 "Third Monitor"
and so on
Hope this Helps.
Your best bet is probably going to be to run the game in Borderless Windowed mode. There are a number of mods and scripts to force the game to do this.
This is the most popular one and was recommended when the question was asked here at Gaming.SE, but comments indicate it's having problems after the latest patch - presumably due to Bethesda changing the way the games executable interacts with Steam.
This alternative provides a script for the free, popular AutoHotKey utility which claims to resize the window.
As always, YMMV as to the stability of the game with either of these options, especially this soon after release, while the game is still being very actively patched.
In a post on the Nexus forum, a user suggests changing which monitor is your "primary":
I have a set up with a 22" LCD and a 32" TV linked up to the same Nvidia card, running in dual screen. I just set the primary monitor to the TV and so all games default to that. Picking the right resolution in a lot of slightly older games is a real pain, but most of the time it's workable. I would suggest you just set the other screen to be your primary, and change it back again afterwards, that should work.