With the advent of recent releases of Windows (at least from Windows 11), local accounts are prevented from accessing administrative shares through the network. If your device is not part of a domain, this can lead to inconveniences.
Attempting to access an administrative share by way of a local account can result in the following, somewhat non-intuitive behaviour:
- A credential prompt that is repetitively re-presented without additional feedback (ideally with a message indicating authentication failure).
- A feedback prompt stating invalid credentials.
- A return prompt indicating denied access.
There’s two ways to address this:
- Create explicit shares.
- Modify the registry to permit local account access to administrative shares.
As the shares (e.g. c$) already exist, why create added overhead by defining equivalent “non-admin” shares?
Let’s fire up regedit and apply what Microsoft have labelled a “workaround”, or what I’d call “restoring function”.
- Navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System - Create a new DWORD (32-bit) Value named
LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy - Set the value to
1.
That’s it. With this in place, you should be able to navigate to \\ComputerName\c$, authenticate as a user with local administrator privileges and access the share.