The administrative shares are the default network shares created by most Windows NT-based operating systems (NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/Windows 7). These default shares share every hard drive partition in the system. These shares will allow anyone who
can authenticate as any member of the local Administrators group access to the root directory of every hard drive on the system. They are not
generally used or useful outside an enterprise environment, and are not accessible by default on
home editions of XP, Vista or Windows 7. 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.