This can occur if you've provided valid DB credentials in your configure.php files and the database itself exists but contains no tables. In this case you need to run zc_install to properly setup the database contents.
Further, this symptom most commonly occurs when moving your site to another server and not properly preserving the DB_PREFIX setting from the old site's configure.php into the new site's configure.php, thus the tablenames cannot be located because they don't match up properly. Or you need to run zc_install to create the proper tables. Or you need to import the correct matching database data, since what you've got in the database presently isn't suitable for your current DB_PREFIX configuration.
(To manually figure out the correct prefix to use, look at the database using phpMyAdmin and see what common 2-4 letter prefix starts all the tablenames. Then set that value into the DB_PREFIX definition in your configure.php file.)