How to connect to admin shares in Windows 10

I recently started using my Windows 7 Ultimate upgrade to Windows 10 and noticed among other frustrating issues an inability to connect to another computer’s administrative (the $ shares) share. As you can imaging there are time befitting the king of the networks’s need to connect directly to a drive on another computer and have total access to the entire drive rather than connect to individual shared folders.

In this case, I was trying to connect to the D$ drive on a Windows 10 computer from another Windows 10 computer. I kept getting different error messages: “Access denied”, Network path not found”, “An error occurred accessing a device or resource”. You can connect to a Windows 7 computer from a Windows 10 computer or vice-versa and the functionality works. Trying to connect to a Windows 10 computer from a Windows 10 computer is a problem. You can connect to shares but not to administrative shares.

I turned to my friend MR Googled and found that there is some added security in Windows 10 that prevents this type of connection by default. To eliminate the restriction, create the following Registry value, LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System. The value is a DWORD and should be set to 1 in order to allow the connection to an administrative share.

You need to reboot the computer for this setting to take effect.

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