Administrative shares in Windows
May 1st, 2008 . by Tommy
When you have more than one computer in your local network, you may want to be able to access all your files on all your machines, whichever one you’re sitting at. Here’s how you can accomplish that in Windows:
To be able to access all files you will be using something called Administrative Shares. These are hidden shares of your local hard disks and optical drives. These shares are not like normal shared folders, in that they require administrative access to open.
An administrative share always has a dollar ($) sign directly behind it, and do not show up by default when you access a computer through Windows Explorer. To access the C:\ drive for instance, you would type this in the address bar of Windows Explorer: \\Computername\c$
This alone is not enough however, as you still need the administrative access rights. To get this, all you have to do is to create an account on each computer that has administrative rights, and the same username and password. To do this, open Control Panel and go to User Accounts and make the necessary account and/or password changes there.
Now, whenever you want access to your files on your other machines, just open Windows Explorer and type in \\Computername\c$ in the address bar - replacing the letter c with the drive letter of the hard disk you want to access.
There’s an additional administrative share that’s standard on all Windows computers, and this is the Windows folder. To access this share, type \\Computername\admin$. If Windows was installed on a different drive than the C:\ drive, it doesn’t matter when you use this share. Pretty useful when you want to view Windows log files on remote machines.
Windows Vista troubleshooting:
In Windows Vista you will get prompted to enter a username and password. Enter the username and password, and tick the box to remember the password if you don’t want to be bothered again. You may get problems here, being denied access even if you entered the correct username and password. Should this be the case, you should read my previous article on enabling admin shares in Vista.
