Today my wife's windows10 lenovo laptop was not starting normally, cycling through various "repair" screens. It does seem to work at least
minimally though.
I've seen this with older version of Windows. The "repair" may have repaired the "original" Windows boot configuration, but the
need for the repair is most likely due to a failing drive. Using the USB live stick you should be able to install smartmontools to check the drive.
I tried booting of my f32 usb stick and thought maybe I could take a look at the SSD. But when I start gnome disks, the internal SSD doesn't
show up! lsblk doesn't show it. I looked through journalctl and saw some reference to ATA1, and I believe some kind of error.
Anyone have any idea what's going on? The SSD is working enough to boot windows and run various things like file manager, so why doesn't it
show in linux?
Windows may have messed with "BIOS" settings in an attempt to recover from a problem.
How old is the drive? SSD bits have a limited lifetime. Some workloads (video production) that fill, empty, and refill the drive very hard on SSD's. Wear leveling strategies try to make the wear even across all the bits, and there are spares when a bit goes bad, but eventually the spares are used up and you lose data in some high-wear area. You should use ddrescue to image the drive and attempt repairs on the image rather than tying to do repairs on a failing drive.