Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, administrative shares and a CDROM drive
I have a Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 running locally, which I use for many purposes, one of them is to serve files. I'm a lazy guy, so I do not share folders, rather I tend to use the default shares, the administrative shares. Since it has been installed, I could only fetch the list of shares veeeery slowly, it took the FAR Navigator to open the list (which includes the hidden administrative shares too) 20-30 seconds - each time.
I did not had any idea how it come, did not had the time to check it out, but recently I was in the bad mood to tolerate one more second waiting, so I started to think.
There was the C$, the D$, those are pretty fine, but there was an E$ too. The last one I found rather strange, as the E drive is the CD-ROM drive, and normally that should not be shared by winlogon, just not like all the other removable devices. What if it's slow to open because it tries to access the drive? If there's no disc in the CD-ROM, then would that slow down the speed? Sure.
With this idea lingering in my mind, I asked Google, how to stop the administrative share on certain drives. He said, I can't. I'll either disable all administrative shares, or give up. I'm not that easy to shake off. Continued my research, with all keywords and things I could come up with, but no luck, Google is my friend, but he did not help this time. But while I was wondering in the registry settings of the "Server" service, I found a key, where the os seems to store some information about the shared folders.
Interestingly, this key contained information about the shares I made (seems I'm not that lazy after all), and the E$ share, but not the other administrative ones, the C$ and D$. This made me think; what if it's just a kind of leftover? Then I remembered after installing the operating system, it allocated the D drive to the CD-ROM and the E drive to the second partition. I did not liked this scenario, so I swapped them - long time ago. After the swap, the new administrative share (D$) was created for the D drive, but it did not removed the E$ share. Instead it seemed to think that this is a kind of user made share, while it still considered it as an administrative share, so if I stopped sharing it, it had been recreated, and with each reboot it reappeared. Funny enough.
So I decided to remove the offending value (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LanmanServer\Shares\E$) from the registry, removed the share once more, restarted the Server service, et voila, the E$ share was finally gone!
Don't know what will come here, let's wait and see... But in the first instance it will be a login box (for myself):
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