Just curious, why don't you? Does anyone in the company or is it just your manager who isn't there right now? Is this a personal laptop that they use at work? If it's a corporate computer someone should have admin access.
It's a company computer, but we found out that they wanted the person's own id/pw, which in this case was not on the local machine but was a domain account. They also wanted admin access to laptop and did not want to ask IT - for confidentiality purposes.

seriously, why even remove the hard drive, throw on audittor dump the sam to a jump drive and crack it on another machine, it would take less than 5 minutes, probably even with boot time.
What is the software you are referring to "audittor"? If so, would you need login access to load it up or can you boot up from it on a CD (like Knoppix)?

...

Also found out that the person who asked us to do that, was in fact NOT supposed to be asking us, but going through other channels, like our manager. It was cool to watch our manager flip and go after the corporate security person. Our manager told us what should have actually happened. So we stopped LC5 and handed the material over to our manager. And the reasons for that deal with legality and security - and we found out that the person who asked us to do the deed, should have known better. Hmmm. Be interesting to hear if anything happens from this whole incident.

Thanks again.

Buenos dias.