Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Vista and Administrative Shares (C$, D$)

Aakk...

So I was trying to access a harddrive using the administrative share on a Vista computer, and I was unable to. Why? Well it seems that microsoft has disabled administrative shares in Vista.

According to Microsoft's "Vista File and Printer Sharing" site....

Sharing the Root of a Drive

Windows XP by default created administrative shares for the root folders of the fixed drives of the computer. For example, for the root of the C: drive on the computer named BobPC, Windows XP automatically shared \\bobpc\c$. The “$” at the end of the share name means that the share name will not appear in the list of shares. For computers running Windows Vista that are members of a workgroup, these administrative shares exist but are blocked for network access for security reasons. You can create your own shares to share your drives from the root of the drive, but Microsoft highly recommends that you share only the folders that you need to, rather than the entire drive.


So, Vista does not allow you to use administrative shares anymore. Unless you hack the registry ;)

From JB's Windows Vista Support FAQ ...

To allow administrators local to a computer to use their administrator powers when accessing the Vista computer remotely, please follow these steps:
  1. Click start
  2. Type: regedit
  3. Press enter
  4. In the left, browse to the following folder: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\system\
  5. Right-click a blank area in the right pane
  6. Click New
  7. Click DWORD Value
  8. Type: LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy
  9. Double-click the item you just created
  10. Type 1 into the box
  11. Click OK
  12. Restart your computer
Now I can access the administrative share from any system!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for the tip!!!
I was on the way to send a hate latter to some MS people as I spent whole day trying to share files between 2 XP and 1 Vista PC.
Even turning off firewalls didn't do anything useful, but rather popping red alerts like in some thriller.

I really don't understand why Vista sets up C$, D$... if you are then not allowed to use them as admin.

Anonymous said...

Not a prob,

It was annoying to find this information. Microsoft changed the security structure of Vista, but with that came some really annoying problems.

Oh well, can't win all the time!

Anonymous said...

then, how to hack local network by using that C$ or D$ ?
because it is blocked and need to entering password..
how to enter it directly without entering password?

Nintendo Wii Update - Official Patch Notes - Sept 14 2009

Nintendo has an update for the Wii, nothing really exciting... The Nintendo Channel was updated with several new features: See other users&...