Troubleshooting

How to enable c$ admin share on Windows 10 and Server 2016

The hidden administrative network share (also known as c$ admin share) is not accessible by default in Windows 10. The administrative share is automatically created but can’t be access by browsing to “\\computername\c$” from a machine on a workgroup or home network. In a domain environment the c$ share should already be available. In a workstation or home environment the administrative share can be enabled from the registry. 

Enable admin share using the registry

  1. From the computer you’d like to enable the admin share, click Start or Cortana and immediately type “cmd“. From the list of results, right-click Command Prompt and select Run as administrator.
  2. Copy and paste the following command into the Command Prompt window and hit enter. 
    REG ADD HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\system /v LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
  3. Reboot the computer.
  4. You can now browse to the computer’s admin share using a local administrative account of the machine. For example: 
    \\computername\c$

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  • Just FYI ... you can use task manager to kill all Windows Explorer processes, then (in taskmanager) start a new instance of explorer.exe (File -> Run) and this will reload the registry and make the edit valid at that point .. no restart needed.

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Published by
Cormang
7 years ago