I bought a refurbished XPS 15 9550 from UK, the 4K with 1GB HDD version.
When I received it, Windows 10 Home edition was pre installed, I made the initial configurations like language, updates, etc. The initial Windows 10 Home from HDD was activated. But, it was slow because of the HDD, and it was an older version of Windows 10, the laptop being manufactured on January 2016.
Now, after 2 days I replaced the HDD with a SSD and made a clean install of Windows 10 Home Anniversary Edition created with Media Creation Tool.
The problem is that with this version of Windows 10, I cannot activate it again. It says the key for the product cannot be used to activate this version of Windows.
So, even the computer was previously activated, and I changed only HDD with SSD, Windows 10 refuses to reactivate. Maybe because of version change.
I cannot get back the original HDD, I already took it out and formatted it to use in external rack.
What I have tried so far, without success :
1. A few chat sessions with Microsoft Support - they remote controlled my notebook and tried to extract some product key to use in Windows Activation- no success. They tried a few methods and scripts to do that. They recommended me to contact Dell support.
2. I even tried myself to use various utilities to extract product key from BIOS, no success - the product keys I was getting were not working for activation.
3. I downloaded the Dell Windows Recovery Image recommended based on my service tag, written it and booted from a USB stick, and went with the recovery process. This should have the Windows factory image installed on my machine (don't know what version, but the edition is Home). Unfortunately, I cannot reactivate Windows 10 recovered after that. The same message about activation not available for this product key is what I'm getting.
So i think I need some personal support for this, but when I try to get to a chat session or something like that, the Dell web site redirects me to a page with a UK phone number and some links to Twitter and Facebook, to contact Dell technicians through them (?!)
I am in Eastern Europe (Romania) and I don't want to call UK for this, as a phone call could take hours and consume my limited phone plan.
Facebook link is the Dell page which I consider ridiculous, how am I supposed to contact someone for a very specific issue through a general corporate Facebook page ?
TLDR : Preinstalled Windows 10 Home on HDD, a version from January was activated. Clean install with Windows 10 Home Anniversary on SDD refuses to activate.
Please offer a solution or a more feasible contact method.