[SOLVED] Paid Pro Licence Erased

Bat.1 is 100% correct here. It was an upgrade to Pro purchased through the Microsoft Store. At the time, I believe this showed up for OEM users who had upgraded their Home versions of Windows 7/8.x to Windows 10 Home. The Settings app actually promoted this upgrade to Pro with a link in the Settings app which opened in the Store app and it actually had a legitimate purchase page with details, etc. There was a discussion here at MDL at the time which went on for a couple of weeks, I believe. Some thought that it may have been an accident, that maybe Microsoft did not intend for that Store page/purchase to go live. Some thought, at the time, that maybe it was a concept to help sway users away from pirating and to purchase legitimate licences. Though mine was indeed a legit OEM upgrade from Windows 8 at the time.

 

No, this was definitely not a spoof. This was legitimate Store app and all. It may have been an accident for it to go live, though. There was a discussion here at MDL that went on for many pages of discussion and several weeks, but my searches are not bringing up anything from that discussion right now for some reason. I will share the old MDL discussion link here if/when I can find it with forum search.

 

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This was separate from the Insider program. Essentially, my Windows 8 (Home Edition / OEM) entitled me to a free upgrade to Windows 10 Home, indeed. But this offer was to then take the legitimate Windows 10 Home licence and upgrade that to Windows 10 Pro for $2.50. Therefore, I would only have Home right now instead of the additional features of Pro. I hope that clarifies a bit more.

 

Bingo! Bat is entirely correct. As a matter of fact, you recall the finer details much more than I can recall.

 

No, there was no actual "key" in this case, not related with that common key that was used to install builds a while back. This is just a digital entitlement. The credit card bill was either Microsoft or Microsoft Corporation. It was also visible within my Microsoft Account under the Billing section for many months after showing the Pro upgrade payment, though for whatever reason the history is not showing it right now.

I should also note, that this digital entitlement for Pro activated my system close to a dozen times over the past year or whatever time period it was. This was long after dropping out of the Insider program. During that time period, I had always done clean installs of Pro with Local Account (no MS Account at that time) and was always activated legitimately with HWID. As noted already, this was a direct purchase through Microsoft (no 3rd party), though they may have accidentally sent this out to public. And Microsoft went on to honor this licence for those who had made the purchase. Now, only recently, I've joined back into the Insider program in the past week.

 

Indeed, all is well now. Clean install of Pro activated with HWID as it had done in the past. I believe that the mistake was entirely on my part this time as I had accidentally used the wrong ESD instead of Pro. I think that I had wrongly used CORE or something along the lines of that. But after wiping things clean and grabbing the proper Pro ESD, it activated by HWID by the time it had shown the desktop (since I gave access to WiFi during install).

My mistake. But I am entirely thankful for everyone who had participated and shared their suggestions. I've got a huge amount of respect for the type of community that MDL members have here.

 

Yes, as you can imagine with that 20-page thread here at MDL there was a lot of confusion on the topic and not much clarity from Microsoft. But yes, the credit card was actually billed and remained billed. Some users thought that the money might be reimbursed at some point. But that did not occur and luckily they did decide to honor the licences. In my case, it was $3.00 or slightly more because it was converted to Canadian dollars.