Forgotten Windows Password Recovery and the "no tables found" error.

A friend of mine brought over his laptop because he couldn't remember his new Windows Vista login password. I said I would work on it and worst case I would have to clear everything and reinstall Vista.

Googling around I found that there were tools for clearing the password. I downloaded and burned to a CD the tool here: here at pogostick.net and later Ophcrack found here. Both are free if you are just clearing a password.

Obviously, I first cleared all of the BIOS based passwords (he did remember these). Then I tried to run the 2 tools listed above. The first one couldn't mount the hard drive and the second gave the error "no tables found".

So I Googled for this error. Found 1 comment that said something about not having a drive for the controller card... I see that this is Linux, so maybe the drive isn't there for my friends laptop's controller card, after all, it is a cheap eMachine. (I'm not a Linux guy so I'm not even sure how this works.) So I pop the hard drive out of his laptop and put it in my laptop.

I then booted and tried the Ophcrack CD and it worked. Case closed.