Unable to access administrative shares on Vista PC

You may be unable to open the Administrative Shares (ADMIN$, C$, D$, etc.) on a Microsoft Windows Vista PC, even if you specify a correct account with administrative access. If attempting to open a UNC path from the Run... command, you will be repeatedly prompted for a username and password, but it will not open. If you attempt to map the path using the net use command from a command-prompt, you will receive the message: "System error 5 has occurred. Access is denied."

This behavior will occur if you are attempting to open an administrative share from a PC in a different security context than the host (i.e. a PC in a different domain, or from any PC if the host is in a workgroup) and the Vista host PC containing the share has UAC enabled. This is a security feature of Vista. The error occurs because when authenticating with an Administrative account to a Vista PC over the network, you are not granted Administrative privileges -- and by default only Administrators can access the administrative shares. To get around this behavior, perform the following steps:

On the Vista host PC, open regedit
Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\system\
Right-click in the right-hand pane and choose New -> DWORD Value (32-bit is sufficient on 64-bit systems).
Name the new value LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy and give it a value of 1.
Close regedit. You do not need to reboot for the change to take effect.

For more information, see: http://blogs.msdn.com/vistacompatteam/archive/2006/09/22/766945.aspx

Author: ASAK
Created: Aug 11 2007
Categories: Windows Vista
TechByte #155

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