signing in with a gmail account

Ok, no worries. It could be that they are missing something on their accounts, which is why it is asking you to sign into the account. If they have signed up to Xbox using a Gmail account, then they would sign in using the Gmail address.

Nathan

You can't really merge two Microsoft Accounts.

If you haven't invested money in the Gmail-Microsoft Account, you could simply back up all your data (i.e. OneDrive, Skype contacts etc.), and delete your Gmail-Micorosoft Account.

After you have deleted that Microsoft Account, add the Gmail address as a sign in Alias to your existing Hotmail Account.

After adding the Gmail Address as a sign in alias, make this the primary sign in email, and restore your OneDrive files to that OneDrive, and add the Skype contacts to that account.

If you received a confirmation email on your gmail account when you redeemed the code, then that's the correct Microsoft account (the one that uses your gmail to sign in).

Sign into your Gmail account using what device ?

Ok this is possible Keep in mind if you used your gmail account for anything that has to do with MS including on a Windows 10 computer then it will have been attached to a MS account.

Just so I am understanding you correctly you want to take your Gmail email and attach it to your MS account that is attached to your xbox profile you have already gone to account.microsoft.com/addassocid
and signed in with your Hotmail account and tried adding your Gmail email as an alias to that account and it came back saying that your Gmail email is already attached to another MS account?

If this is the case we need to find out what MS account the Gmail account is attached to.

So if you need to figure out what MS account the Gmail account is attached to you would want to go to account.live.com/acsr to try and get back into that MS account that has the Gmail address on it.

To make the rest of this go smoother I will use the following chart

A1= Hotmail account

A2=Gmail account

Keep in mind following these steps will ONLY change the email you use to sign into your account with AND IF YOU remove the HOTMAIL email from the account at the end these steps you will NO LONGER have access
to the Hotmail email IF you want to keep the Hotmail email you can leave it on the account and just have multiple aliases on your account that you would be able to use either one of them to sign into the account.

So with that being said follow these directions after recovering your Gmail account:

1. Sign into A2 at account.microsoft.com/addassocid and you would want to choose to add a new (outlook account) to this account (dummy account)

2. Make new Outlook account the primary account on A2

3. Remove Gmail email from that account.

4. Sign out.

5. Sign into A1 at account.microsoft.com/addassocid Choose add an existing email and put your gmail email in there they will send you an email to verify that you have access to that gmail email to verify
it.

6. make the Gmail email the primary email.

7. Remove Hotmail email from the account (REMEMBER DO NOT DO THIS IF YOU STILL WANT ACCESS TO YOUR HOTMAIL EMAIL)

Once you do this any console that you have this account on you would need to remove the profile from it and then add it back with the gmail email.