Recover gamertag / Live sign up

Ok a freind of mine has finally got onto Live, the problem is hes having trouble getting his local profile to be associated with his Live profile.

My understanding of it is he has his local profile (which he had pre-live) called say "Gamertag" which has all his saves in it. When he signs up to live he whacks this in as his user tag and it says alraedy in use (he created it as a gamertag before he was connected on the website), So he clicks recover and gets another profile created on his HD with the same name but this profile has no data in it and 0 saves.

How does he solve this? Obviously he'd like to keep his gamertag, but he deffo doesnt want to lose his saves.

Anyone got any ideas?

He will need an online gamertag, if he's chosen something like "Tom" then someone already has it, they are all unique.

It's whether or not there is a way to transfer all those original achievements etc.. from his offline account to his online account. I knew there would be an issue with this and as a result I signed up to be online immediately. .

So did i, just found out how to do it and suprise suprise it costs money.

Link

Basically casue hes made his Offline profile as a Online profile from the Xbox site hes got to get rid of it somehow, Now he cant delete it so hes got to rename it which costs Points. That and theres nothing to say someone wont grab his tag while hes trying to sign up to it.

Basically its time for him to think of a new name i think.