my Iphoto library disappeared and I can't restore from time machine. What can I do?

Disconnect the TM drive, reboot and/or try restoring from a earlier date.

It sounds like your iPhoto Library got corrupted and that was transferred to TM, could be all your states are bad.

To recovery your deleted iPhoto Library off the boot drive, your going to need to stop using the boot drive in OS X, because the files are still there, just waiting to be overwrittten with new data.

So your going to have to create this to boot the computer with and use $100 Data Rescue (on the external drive) to recovery your iPhoto Library and it's photo's.

Create a data recovery/undelete external boot drive

Another option is to take the machine(s) to a local PC/Mac repair shop, as their main business is data recovery, only to Apple if your having hardware issues.

My computer is dead, is my personal data lost?

Or you can try and see if iPhoto can repair/recover the Library. See here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2638

I had the same problem. I found that I got the error message when I tried to restore from a snapshot (represented by the white tickmarks on the right side of the screen in Time Machine—these are stored on the internal hard drive). But I did successfully restore from a backup (represented by the pink tickmarks—these are stored on the backup drive). I don't know if that was a coincidence in my case or a consistent feature of how iPhoto interacts with Time Machine.