Phantom share won't go away on remote system
I have two boxes, one with a 1.5 terabyte drive that I share and the other box uses that drive to read data from. They are both running Windows 7 and both have latest updates. Several months ago I created a share that was used on the 2nd box for a while but I then deleted that share and created a new one. I then started using the new share successfully. However, on the box that uses the share I notices that there is still a reference to the original share and to some degree it seems to be valid, that is, I can still read data from it but when I check the box with the 1.5 terabyte drive there is no record anywhere that the share exists. I went to the Computer Management dialog and opened the Shared Folders folder and then the Shares folder and the share that is visible on the remote machine is not in this list. By valid reference I mean that I can see the share in windows explorer underneath Network/Computer name - the phantom share doesn't show up on any other computer on the network. When I click on the share I can see files that used to be there but I can't read or delete them due to error saying they can't be accessed. It seems that the remote system has managed to hang on to the deleted share in some way and I need to find a way to remove it. As a test I removed all shared folders from the machine with the 1.5 terabyte drive and the remote system still had access through the phantom share. Any ideas on how to get the remote system to forget about this phantom share?
August 15th, 2011 12:23pm

Hi, Thanks for posting in Microsoft TechNet forums. Please try disk clean up first.Usually, this is because Windows system files are owned by the TrustedInstaller service by default, and Windows File Protection will keep them from being overwritten. To delete them, you need to grand yourself full control over the folder. Click Start, type CMD and press Ctrl+Shift+Enter key combination to open an administrator command prompt. To take ownership of the file, you’ll need to use the takeown command. Here’s an example: takeown /f C:\Windows\System32\Test.txt The folder Test.txt under C:\Windows\System32 is the one you want to delete. After taking ownership of the file, please run the cacls command to give yourself full control rights to the file: cacls C:\Windows\System32\Test.txt /G Magon:F Please note: Magon is my username, replace it with your username. After that, try deleting the folders. If still no go, in case any application is using them, please boot into Safe Mode and repeat the steps above. Good Luck. Best Regards Magon Liu TechNet Subscriber Support in forum. If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tnmff@microsoft.com Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.
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August 16th, 2011 5:22am

Open command prompt and type in: net share This will pull up a list of all the shares, hidden and otherwise, on the system. As for your phantom files, maybe you have offline files and folders caching the old content (or parts of it at least). http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Understanding-offline-files http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Manage-disk-space-for-offline-files
August 16th, 2011 2:56pm

Hi Magon, Thanks for the response - here's what happened when I followed your instructions: Just to be clear - the shared folder and the files within it are only visible on a remote computer. The computer that originally created the share no longer shares the folder or the files under this share name. This means that I cannot execute a takeown command on the remote system where I actually see the phantom folder because I get this error: C:\Windows\system32>takeown /f \\MOONCAPTAIN-PC\Movies ERROR: File ownership cannot be applied on insecure file systems; there is no support for ACLs. Also since the share doesn't exist on the original system I can't execute the command there either. Responding to Jammrock5 I executed the net share command on the originating computer and it returned all the values I saw in the system management shares dialog and no others. I did not see the share that I deleted several months ago. Also I haven't ever implemented or used offline files and folders - so if there are any they have been automatically created by the OS. I know this is a weird problem - I am hoping the above information will help clarify the nature of the issue.
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August 16th, 2011 3:47pm

Jammrock5 - apparently, without even trying I created an offline copy of the old share and then when I removed the original share the copy remained. I did some research with the links you provided and removed the "extra" folder from the network shares using the offline files interface. Thanks to everybody for your help.
August 16th, 2011 5:03pm

None of these answers work for me. Have this problem on several machines. Not using offline files (and I checked as above to be sure that offline files were not somehow created). The problem is slightly different. My phantom shares are NAS shares that no longer exist. (The NAS exists, the shares do not.) When you click on a phantom share in Windows Explorer, you get an error dialog box titled "Network Error" that says "Windows cannot access \\nas-name\share-name." "Check the spelling of the name. Otherwise, there might be a problem with your network. To try to identify and resolve network problems, click Diagnose." The only options are to click Diagnose or Cancel. OF course, this is NOT a network error. The shares really don't exist. I used to see problems like this in Windows XP, which would let you simply delete the phantom share. Windows 7 won't let you do that. How do I delete the phantom shares. This is confusing the hell out of my users.
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September 5th, 2011 2:51am

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