Opening a remote machine's Windows C drive [closed]

Question

I'm trying to locally mount a machine's C drive that is on my LAN. I need to able to browse the contents of the other machine when tracing through code. I once saw a sys admin do some crazy windows incantation from the cmd prompt. Something like $remote_machine/local_access/C

Is anyone familiar with how this is done?

Answer 1

If it's not the Home edition of XP, you can use \\servername\c$

Mark Brackett's comment:

Note that you need to be an Administrator on the local machine, as the share permissions are locked down

Answer 2

If you need a drive letter (some applications don't like UNC style paths that start with a machine-name) you can "map a drive" to a UNC path. Right-click on "My Computer" and select Map Network Drive... or use this command line:

NET USE z: \server\c$\folder1\folder2

NET USE y: \server\d$

Note that you can map drive-to-drive or drill down and map to sub-folder.

Answer 3

By default, Windows makes the root of each drive available (provided you've got Administrator privileges) as (e.g.) \\server\c$. These are known as Administrative Shares.