17 December 2006 in Windows | Comments (0)

I’ve been setting up a new machine at home this weekend and one thing I needed to do was access the files on my main desktop machine that’s running Windows Vista RTM. I enabled file sharing and then hit the box and tried to access the admin shares (c$, d$ etc) and got prompted for a login. That’s fine. Bang in my username and password on the box and get denied. Try again. Denied.

Wee bit of digging and I found that accessing admin shares as a local admin remotely is now disabled for security reasons. You can access the shares if you’re a domain administrator and you can still remote into the machine as a local admin but you cannot access admin shares as a local admin account remotely.

The workaround is a small registry tweak:

1. Open regedit
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft\ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ system
3. Create a new key (Right click -> New, DWORD Value (32bit))
4. Name the key “LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy” and give it the value “1″
5. Click OK

Once you have done this you should be able to access the admin shares remotely under a local admin account.

- JD