Administrative Share - Share Names

Share Names

Administrative shares are the term Microsoft defined for the collection of by-default automatically shared filesystem resources including the following:

• any drive letter + $ (only the local disk volumes, not any removable devices such as CD/DVD drives, USB flash drives)
• admin$ (which shares access to %SYSTEMROOT%, which is usually C:\WINDOWS or C:\WINNT)

The "$" appended to the end of the share name means that it's a hidden share. Windows will not list such shares among those it defines in typical queries by remote clients to obtain the list of shares. This means that one needs to know the name of an administrative share in order to access it.

It is commonly believed that any share that includes the final '$' character defines it as an administrative share. According to Microsoft's use of the term "administrative share", this is false. While any share (even non-administrative shares) can include a '$' character at the end of its name, only those by-default shares created by Windows containing the '$' suffix are considered administrative shares.

Generic UNC address for an administrative share:

\\NetworkComputerName\(Drive letter)$

For example:

\\MyComputer\c$

This represents the administrative share for the "C" drive on the computer "MyComputer". This works just as well for any other local drive on the computer, e.g. \\MyComputer\d$, \\MyComputer\e$ (assuming those are local drives and not removable drives).

\\MyComputer\ADMIN$

This represents the administrative share for the %SYSTEMROOT% object on the computer "MyComputer".