Connect to Administrative Shares on a Windows 11 Networked Computer

Sharing files and folders in Windows is nothing new and you may have configured some shared folders and printers on your computer at some point. And you might have also noticed that sharing folders in Windows 11 is more complicated than it was with Windows 10. But one thing you might not have known about is the built in Windows administrative shares.

These shares are used to access other files and folders on a remote computer that have not been manually shared on that remote computer but are hidden by default. So, if you have administrative permissions on a remote computer and need to access, let’s say, the C drive or any other drive on that computer, you can do so using this type of share. In this article, we will be showing you how to connect to administrative shares on a Windows 11 networked computer.

Keep in mind that administrative shares are not available on the Home versions of Windows. Microsoft intentionally disables administrative shares on Home editions to reduce the risk of unauthorized remote access. These shares are primarily intended for remote administration, which is more common in business or enterprise environments. You will also find that you cannot access an admin share on a Windows 11 Pro computer from a Windows 11 Home computer. Windows 11 Home blocks remote use of local admin accounts by default. Even if you enter the correct admin credentials for the Pro machine, the Home system strips away admin tokens over the network.

I will now connect to the admin share on a Windows 11 Pro computer named Win11-Pro from another Windows 11 Pro computer. To access these shares, I will need to type in the UNC path just like you would for regular shares, but I will use a $ to tell Windows that I am accessing an admin share. To access the administrative share for the C drive on a remote computer, I would use the UNC path of \\ComputerName\C$. So, in my case it would be \\win11-pro\c$.

You will then be presented with the same login credentials box as you saw when accessing a standard shared folder.

When trying to access an administrative share, you may see a message like the one shown below.

If you are getting access denied errors, you may want to ensure that the C$ and Admin$ shares are listed by running the net share command on the computer that you are trying to access remotely.

You can also try to use a local account if your Microsoft account is not working. You will need to use an account on the computer you are trying to connect to and use the format comptuername\localuser. You still may run into problems even with a local account.

When trying to connect to admin shares, you may find it difficult to do and need to try a variety of troubleshooting options to get it to work. One method you can use to troubleshoot is to disable UAC on the remote computer by using a registry edit rather than disabling UAC via the GUI. If you go to the following registry key on the remote computer:

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

Then find EnableLUA on the right, double click it and set its value to 0. Then reboot the computer and see if you can connect to the admin share. If so, then that tells you that Windows is stripping away your admin privileges and treating your account like a standard account.

To get around this, firstly you can set the EnableLUA value back to 1 so you are not leaving your computer unsecured. Then in that same System section in the registry editor, create a DWORD value called LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy and set its value to 1.

If you want a faster way to do this process, then you can type in the following data into your Run box and press enter:

reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\system /v LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

Assuming you have the correct permissions to access the remote admin share, then you will see the contents of the entire C drive as shown in the image below. If you wanted to access a different drive, such as the D drive (assuming you have a D drive), then you would type in \\computername\D$.

Now we can see all the folders on the C drive and not just the ones that are shared.

There is also another type of administrative share that might come in handy, and that is the . This share will show you the contents of the Windows folder on that remote computer. To access this type of share, simply use the same format and type in \\computername\admin$.

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