When you try to do a Bare Metal Recovery to a new Windows 7 or 8 OS you are unable to see any shares even though you may successfully authenticate to the OS.

Solution

Windows 7 still creates the administrative shares on install, but you can’t use them out of the box. First of all, you need to have File and Printer Sharing enabled. And the way to do that has once again been changed:

• Open the control panel.
• Go to Network and Internet.
• Go to Network and Sharing Center.
• In the left column, click on Change advanced sharing settings.
• There are two profiles. You probably don’t want this on when you’re on a public network so open Home or Work.
• Under the header File and Printer sharing, select the Turn on… option.

If once File and Printer sharing has been enabled you are still unable to access the admin shares you will need to also complete the following registry change:

• Click on the orb (= the round button with the Windows logo in the taskbar) and type regedit in the search box.
• Open the registry editor.
• Navigate all the way to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System.
• Right-click in the pane on the right side and add a new DWORD (32-bit).
• Give the new setting the name LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy.
• Double click on that setting and give it a value of 1.

Once the registry change has been applied, reboot your machine and you will now be able to access the admin shares and perform the Bare Metal Recovery.

Note. If the above still is not working also confirm that any HomeGroup settings within the OS are disabled as this has been known to cause issues with the Admin shares.