That said, I'd encourage you to think hard about why you need to access the system root - is it to store settings for all users? If so, you may want to consider having a separate application for managing those settings (with it's own manifest). Getting a manifest embedded in an exe can be a bit tricky, and there were a lot of problems with manifest handling in earlier versions of Visual C++, but most of them are worked out now.

In addition to the manifest Using JNI to call ShellExecute with verb = runas will also do this - but specifying things with a manifest is a more robust way of doing it.