Windows 7 – The $admin share

I got my shiny new copy of Windows 7 today from MSDN. It became available to MSDN subscribers earlier this week.

If you have access then give it a spin, there are some excellent improvements over Vista.

I installed it today to test some of our software. One issue, that is also in Vista, is that file and printer sharing and the $admin share are disabled out of the box.

This is fine for your computer at home. You don’t want this turned on unless you absolutely need to.

In a corporate environment it is used quite a bit by the likes of Backup Exec, the distribution tool for Kaspersky antivirus, the remote execute tool PSExec from SysInternals, and last but not least our admin tools heavily rely on the admin share too.

The simple fact is if you need to push software remotely, you are going to need access to the $admin share.

This special share is automatically created when Windows is installed, but it is not available unless file and printer sharing is turned on.

Like I said before, this is disabled by default in Windows 7, and unfortunately Microsoft has yet again changed the method to turn it back on. The steps you need to take are now different than the ones you took in Vista.

How do you get it back up and running in Windows 7?

Start by going into the control panel.

Click on “Network and Internet”

Then click on “Network and Sharing Center”

A new window will be displayed. Look on the left side.

See the item that says “Change Advanced Sharing Settings” – Click on it.

Now you are shown different profiles.

The list can change depending on how your system is configured. Windows 7 will determine automatically what profile your network card is using. You may want to enable file and printer sharing on all of them, or limit it to the “Home or Work” profile for higher security.

Expand the profile you want to modify, and scroll down until you see “File and Printer Sharing”

Click on “Turn on file and printer sharing”

Save your changes.

I wish I could say that is all you need to do, but unfortunately you also need to make a registry change.

Open regedit, and drill down to this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

Under this key you will need to create a new DWORD value called:

LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy

Set it to 1, and reboot.

Now you can access the $admin share on your Windows 7 machine.