Administrative shares on Windows 7

This one it’s just a small tip for everyone using a Windows 7 machine on as a standalone machine and not in a domain environment.

In Windows 7 the administrative shares (like C$ or ADMIN$) are still created, but they're not available out of the box for a standalone machine. To activate the administrative shares you need to:

Enable File and Print Sharing

• Open Control Panel
• Go to Network and Internet
• Click on Network and Sharing Center
• In the left column, click on Change Advanced sharing settings
• Here you should have 2 network profiles. On the network profile you want select Turn On under the header File and Print Sharing

I believe you can also achieve this by going to Windows Firewall with Advanced Security and changing the File and Print Sharing rule to enable or allow.

Now…you still need to do a little tweak:

Registry Tweak

• Open the registry editor (start –> run –> regedit)
• Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
• Right-click on the right pane and create a new DWORD (32bits)
• Give the new DWORD the name LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy and give it the value 1

Now you just need to restart you machine and your are now able to access the machine administrative shares.

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