By Philip Churchill on September 19th, 2012
Remove Default Shares in WS2012 Essentials
In Windows Server 2012 Essentials there is no way to remove the default shares from within the Dashboard – But there is a workaround.
If you are fed up with the default "Company" or "Recorded TV" share for example, the following will get rid of any default shares which you no longer require. In the following example "Recorded TV":
- In Explorer, stop sharing the folder.
- Remove the registry entry with "Name=Recorded Tv" in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows server\Storage Service\Folders.
- Stop the service "Windows Server Storage Service" and then re-start it.
- It’s up to you if you want to remove the folder or not in Explorer.
Workaround courtesy of Davie Chen from Microsoft.
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I tried this and the registery keeps coming back… also the dashboard shows those folders missing and keeps prompting me to readd
As with Mohammad, it appears that the media shares such as Recorded TV and Music etc are happy to be removed, but if you remove the Company share, then upon restarting the Storage Service, it recreates itself.
Changing the REG_MULTI_SZ value to Hide=1 doesn’t do anything either.
[...] Deleting any of the default server shares such as Recorded TV or Company (if you aren’t a company and you aren’t using Media Center for Live TV Archiving to the Essentials Server) for example causes warnings of missing folders in the Dashboard and causes Critical status alerts in the alert panel. There is a workaround for this courtesy of Philip Churchill at http://www.mswhs.com/2012/09/remove-default-shares-in-ws2012-essentials/. [...]