hard drive doesn't appear as device

Question

I have an Acer Aspire R11 combination Laptop / Tablet. It has a 32 Gb harddrive with a few partitions. Windows 8.1 is installed on it. I recently had an issue with partitioning. I decided to use an Ubuntu Live USB stick to first try to repair the partitions - and, if that failed, wipe the drive and install Ubuntu to it.

The problem is, it doesn't see the internal drive (or any of its partitions) at all. It only sees the USB stick and any other USB drives I connect. There is nothing that even shows up in /dev that looks like it might be the drive. Only sda and sda1 exist, which are the USB stick and its primary partition. Even running gparted, it only shows /dev/sda. I know this laptop has a weird soldered in SD/MMC chip as a hard drive, but I would still expect it to show up as a normal device. How can I get Ubuntu to recognize the drive exists?

Note: I have tried in both UEFI and Legacy modes.

Added on 4/24/2016 per comment, here is the dmesg ouput:

[    0.069652] SCSI subsystem initialized
[   10.284914] Block layer SCSI generic (bsg) driver version 0.4 loaded (major 249)
[   10.802897] scsi host0: usb-storage 1-1:1.0
[   12.258989] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Verbatim STORE N GO       1100 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
[   12.260571] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
[   12.260974] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 15669248 512-byte logical blocks: (8.02 GB/7.47 GiB)
[   12.261628] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[   12.261632] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 43 00 00 00
[   12.262293] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] No Caching mode page found
[   12.262296] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Assuming drive cache: write through
[   12.265565]  sda: sda1
[   12.267592] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI removable disk

"VERBATIM STORE-N-GO" is the USB stick I am booting from. Nothing else appears to be listed, it's like the hard drive for the laptop just disappeared.

Additional information: I had to prove the hard drive is still there, so I F2 booted into the UEFI settings. The hard drive shows up, it's identified as EMMC: HBG4e 32G maybe that information will help.

Output of lsblk:

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    1   7.5G  0 disk 
└─sda1   8:1    1   7.5G  0 part /cdrom
loop0    7:0    0 975.9M  1 loop /rofs

Not sure what loop0 is there for. My understanding was that is only used when mounting an .iso or other image file as a drive. Not doing that in this case. But no MMC devices.

Output of lshw with LC_MESSAGE=POSIX

  *-usb:0
       description: Mass storage device
       product: Mass Storage
       vendor: Generic
       physical id: 1
       bus info: usb@1:1
       logical name: scsi0
       version: 1.06
       serial: 5FEAAEA0
       capabilities: usb-2.00 scsi emulated scsi-host
       configuration: driver=usb-storage maxpower=200mA speed=480Mbit/s
     *-disk
          description: SCSI Disk
          physical id: 0.0.0
          bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0
          logical name: /dev/sda
          size: 3851MiB (4038MB)
          capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
          configuration: logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512 signature=07578645

Note: I'm using a different USB stick, one with Lubuntu 16.04 live. I kept Ubuntu 14.04 on the Verbatim Store-N-Go incase I couldn't get 16.04 working.

output of lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Device 2280 (rev 21)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 22b1 (rev 21)
00:0b.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Device 22dc (rev 21)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Device 22b5 (rev 21)
00:1a.0 Encryption controller: Intel Corporation Device 2298 (rev 21)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Device 2284 (rev 21)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 22c8 (rev 21)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 22ca (rev 21)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Device 229c (rev 21)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation Device 2292 (rev 21)
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15)
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 3165 (rev 81)