I Can’t Access The Admin Shares!

Windows provides a number of pre-configured administrative shares to allow administrators to perform functions like system backup.  These include ones like C$ and ADMIN$.  However, in a workgroup environment Microsoft has made these unavailable without any obvious way to change that.

The Solution

Like so many of these types of issues, the solution is a change the registry.  Making changes to the registry is not for the faint-hearted, and we take no responsibility if you mess up your computer by making registry changes when you don’t know what you’re done.

That being said, you need to add the following entry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy

and make it a DWORD with a value of 1.

To add this entry yourself do the following:

  1. Right click the Windows Icon at lower left
  2. Select Run, enter regedit and click OK
  3. Drill down to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System entry
  4. Right click the word System in the tree and select New, DWORD (32-Bit) Value
  5. A new entry will be made in the right window called something like New Value #1
  6. Right click at and select Modify
  7. In the Value Name box change the text to LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy
  8. In the Value Data box change the value to 1
  9. Click OK, check the entry looks correct (see below) and close the Registry Editor

The result should look like this:

regimage

If you trust us you can save the text in blue below to a file called LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy.reg and run it and it will make the changes for you.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
“LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy”=dword:00000001

You should now find that the administrative shares in a workgroup environment are now available.

We take no credit for discovering this fix; that goes to Adam Bertram and his tech site.