Windows Azure: Trial - VM's deleted after expiration

Today I wanted to reactivate an expired Trial of a Windows Azure hosted VM. As I’m motivated to pay for this Service, I thought I can just go to the account Management, add my credit Card data and would be ready to reactivate my SharePoint Installation.

I checked my available Services and discovered, that my VM was deleted somehow. I checked then if my Image is still in the Gallery, by luck it was. I decided to set up a new VM and attach the existing disk. I was able to create the new VM and attach existing disk. While provisioning the following error appeared:

 “A lease conflict occurred with the blob <blob url>” 

It seems that in the service configuration, my machine is still registered and based on the naming convections my VM could not be recreated. So how to recreate a new machine with the same disk?

There is a Manual how to redeploy a deleted machine, but it didn’t help in my Case.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsazure/en-US/a00b2e34-be7b-4f05-af75-f239613c5599/how-to-redeploy-a-deleted-windows-azure-virtual-machine

I found another article which involves power shell to delete the existing lease, unfortunately this didn’t work for me also.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsazure/en-US/cc9bacfc-2c11-4010-b535-f1b0a141d317/error-when-reusing-existing-disk-for-new-vm-a-lease-conflict-occurred-with-the-blob

The error I received after running this script was, that my storage account is not properly linked to my account.

If all of the above steps didn’t help, only Microsoft Azure Support can help u. But remember, u need to buy the technical support option. The billing guys won’t help you… welcome in the cloud ;-)

Summary: Add payment Details before your Trial expires, or u might loose ur work.