Drive letters scrambled; cannot boot, cannot change

History: The pc I built to replace my previous DAW has suffered from intermittent problems; in each previous case, I simply ended up (right or wrong) pulling the non-essential ssd/hdds and did a clean install largely because, aside from installing some utilities I favor, the machine itself was so near to being 'empty' that I didn't bother with trying to salvage it, I just erased the ssd install drive and my one hdd data drive (that I moved my profiles to) and reinstalled from scratch. So, the DAW I am referring to is in its current incarnation, whatever the current version of Windows 10 pro would have been when I downloaded and installed last July (2021) from M$.

Now, having configured the machine and having managed to install most of the software that I need for the DAW to do what I want over the last two months -- yesterday, during an install (with me playing music in the background to kill the time) the system suddenly starting hanging different apps (including the new audio interface -- a Roland Studio-Capture) so after the download in progress finished, I shut down the apps that I could and rebooted the machine.

Except that it didn't. Reboot. Blank screens all round, system lights flickering but nothing comes up and I even let it try to fix itself by letting it run all night. Nada.

Today, I unplugged one monitor so I could see what windows was doing, power-cycled and booted into the bios to make sure all settings were the same (they were) and then tried to boot into windows.

Windows won't boot; does it's pointless 'I'm trying to fix things for you' routine and end up with the light blue screen of false hopes. I can get to the bios, I can endlessly reboot to the same set of light blue screens or I can get it to give me a command prompt. I cannot boot to safe mode. I can look at restore points but the last time this happened I tried to do the restore point thing and it failed and then things were really beyond hope so I reinstalled the OS.

So anyway, this time I drop to the command prompt and take quick look around -- and I find that all my drive letters have changed. My main boot drive is now 'X' and the user profiles (which should be H) are M or something. Every single one is a different letter from when I configured it a couple months ago. Doesn't which device is what, it matters that it seems to explain why it won't boot.

Following directions I found here, I attempted to use diskpart to list the volume and then change the drive letters. Doesn't matter what I change them to -- even if it confirms the change on screen -- because when I try to boot, the drive letters all go back to what they were before I changed them.

The instructions I found here specify using an 'elevated' command prompt but I don't see how I can do that -- windows is in control of supplying the command prompt and it may not be elevated which would explain why I can't change them.

Is there a way to get to an elevated command prompt from the command prompt provided? Is there any other way I can fix this problem or am, once again, condemned to start over from scratch? Why would windows randomly decide now was the time to reassign my drive letters and how to I stop it from doing so?

Okay, if what you say is true (and I have no reason to doubt it) then I'm dead in the water, again. There is no way I know of to find out what the actual issue is . . . and this is (at least) the third time this has happened since I built the machine. Maybe even the fourth. And they've all been pretty much the same.

I don't have the machine running (bootable) so I can't run any diagnostics even if I knew what they would be. I have a machine which just up and quits randomly. Can't boot. Can't get to safe mode. Can't run anything meaningful. Some times it quits in a week, sometimes a month -- this time after nearly four months. Could be anything hardware or software but the same software has never been run in exactly the same order and I seriously doubt that anything I was loading in the last week would cause a problem unless that problem involves the curse which is Windows 10.

Thanks for pointing out my error . . . . but, in the end it doesn't end up making any difference to the outcome. Not your fault . . . I guess after 40 years of building computers, I finally built myself a real lemon.

I'm really not sure what to do. The boot ssd on the m.2 slot is brand new as is the mobo, the chip, the memory, the power supply, all of the other ssd and most of the hdds. Trying to find which which component is failing seems like another long investment of time to get to the end only to find that I don't know anymore than I did when I started. But I really can't afford to replace EVERYTHING in the hopes that I move passed whatever it is that keeps this box from functioning.

I don't know anything about what is good for diagnostics anymore. So many things I tried back in the day (not on this machine) turned out to be a waste of time and money.

I have not yet been successful in doing a recovery install in Win10; perhaps I've just not done it correctly. I can try it, I suppose -- I don't have anything to lose but what good will it be if I have to keep doing it to make up for whatever defect is in this machine that I built and it quits again in a week-month-year? I'm going on 65 -- I don't have enough time left to waste it on rabbit trails.

I imagine most of the people on these forums are much younger and have time to work on a seemingly hopeless problem -- I know I used to be that way, going at it for the sheer fun of the ultimate victory figuring it out. I want to spend my remaining years working on my too-long-put-off audio/video projects. Having almost lost my life twice in the last three years, I'm not in a position to waste time and energy on something that will ultimately be futile.

Beyond the repair install -- does anyone have concrete suggestions for trying to find what it is that is causing this recurrent problem (assuming, for the moment, that the same symptoms equate to the same recurrent problem(s))?

- - - Updated - - -

Seeing no one is offering advice beyond the 'repair' install -- I went out and gave it a shot. As expected, it doesn't run by any means I can find. Each attempt is met with a message stating that it cannot run for some reason (something about how the system was booted which doesn't make any sense to me). Whatever it is it wants, I can't find a way to give it.

I attempted to use the usb I had made when I first installed the system and then, attempted to boot from the installed DAW system which, of course, leads me to the whole 'couldn't repair windows' scenario; from there I went to a system prompt, used diskpart to identify the usb drive, switched to it, did a directory to verify I was in the correct drive and executed setup.exe -- which loads the correct OS install pages but doesn't allow me to do the repair install so . . . .