Enable Mapping to \\Hostname\C$ Share on Windows 7 or Vista
Just about everybody knows about the hidden administrator C$ share that is always built into Windows file sharing, but you might have wondered why you can’t use that in Windows 7 or Vista.
The reason this doesn’t work is because of UAC (User Account Control) that Vista is (in)famous for. By default Vista doesn’t allow UAC elevation over the network with a local user account.
There’s a registry key that we can use to change this behavior to work the same as Windows XP. This will make your computer less secure, and I can’t recommend that you do this… but it’s also good to understand how Windows works.
Manual Registry Hack
Open regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then navigate down to the following key, creating a new key if it doesn’t exist.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
On the right-hand side, add a new 32-bit DWORD value named LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy and set the value to 1.
To remove this tweak you can set the value to 0 or just delete the key.
At this point you can map to the C$ share and also perform some other administrative tasks remotely. Note that you will need to enable file sharing in the network and sharing center, and make sure that your firewall settings will allow sharing.
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Excellent! Just what the doctor ordered. Thanks.
Excellent! I’ve been looking for this information for the past two days, since I got my new computer. I could not get network file access (\\hostname\c$) to work at all. Hopefully this will be the fix I’ve been looking for.
Actually, this is totally unnecessary. What you should do instead is go through the new ’sharing wizard’ and share some random folder. I just made a new one and shared it. After that, your c$ etc. folders are created automatically. You can delete the random folder afterwards, and the c$ folders remain shared – no registry hacking required.
This is excellent! Thank you!
This has allowed me to access the C$ share on my Vista Home Premium machine.
But for some reason, it’s also enabled remote shutdown. So now I can use the DOS shutdown command from another Windows machine, or ‘net rpc shutdown -C “Remote Shutdown” -I -U ‘. I couldn’t do this before changing this registry key – so you’ve helped me fix both problems with just one simple change!
Thank you!
Just wanted to thank you, as i’ve been punching myself for a half an hour in frustration trying to do that on my freshly installed Windows 7
This website is great! Loads of info. I have set a link on my own blog back to this site. Hope that is OK.