Do most people have problems like this or am I some combination of the most unlucky, most poorly equipped, and most inept Linux user ever?

PS - Haha, I just found some system restore disks:

"Error: No hard disk found
Restore cannot continue"

This is awful.

I doubt they would have set the password to {;]sd-3vf@/!3'}';][}# or something similar though .

I don't have a clue about this... I had a similar problem with debian woody (I got it about 2 weeks before sarge, which fixed the problem). It's could be to do with xfree86 or xorg (depending on what mepis uses, I don't know) not being configured correctly. Type:
or replace xserver-xfree86 with xorg depending on the x server that mepis uses. Are you getting a graphical login screen, that would mean that xorg is configured correctly... so I guess what I said above might not be needed (I left it incase). Are there any other desktop enviroments or window managers installed? Try those if they are (it looked like kdm, the login screen, press menu -> session type.

Hmm, did the xserver reconfig and nothing changed - "no screens found."

Here's the error message I get:
"XIO: fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X Server ":0.0"
after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events recurring."

I can't seem to get the thing to load GRUB now either...and it's making weird noises.

Probably not the last one, but maybe the first two.

Hey I had plenty of problems! I switched between mandrake 10.1, slackware 10.0, slackware 10.1, (tried didn't get far) gentoo, debian woody (didn't support my hardware), before almost sticking with mandrake and all it's dependancy hell. I then found debian, but not without alot of knowledge gained from alot of problems.

Ok - I've diagnosed a problem that I can attack directly: my partition table is screwed up. I used PartitionMagic to move everything around and create/delete some partitions, but now I'm having trouble.

I downloaded "The Ultimate Boot CD" and tried some partition managers / boot repairers, but they all just said "error - can't read partition table." I don't know what kind of problems they can help with if they can't help here; this is the archetypal partition problem, I imagine.

Anyone have any favorite partition repair/management tool that I could boot with?