Smartctl issues in Cygwin with elevated terminal

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 13/09/2022 18:23, Christian Franke wrote:
> Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:
>> I recently noticed that smartctl only works when the Cygwin Terminal 
>> isn't run as administrator - the opposite way round to Linux where you 
>> need superuser privileges to access the disk.
>>
>> With Administrator privileges on Windows 11, I get:
>>
>> "Read Device Identity Failure Input/Output error"
> 
> This likely happens because one of the tried pass-through I/O-controls 
> returns an error code which does not mean "not implemented". This is a 
> limitation or bug in the driver of the disk controller.
> 
> For further diagnostics, try for example. 'smartctl -r ioctl,2 -i /dev/sda'
> 
> 
>>
>> But it continues to work fine as a normal user.
> 
> When run without admin rights for a SATA device, smarctl may print:
> "Warning: Limited functionality due to missing admin rights"
> and then prints only limited device identify and SMART DATA information 
> returned by IOCTL_STORAGE_QUERY_PROPERTY and IOCTL_STORAGE_PREDICT_FAILURE.
> 
> Other functionality requires admin rights and a working pass-through 
> I/O-control - try 'smartctl -x /dev/sda'.
> 
> 
> Please note that the above is not Cygwin specific as it applies to both 
> (Cygwin and Mingw-w64) Windows builds of smartctl. Use this ML for 
> related support requests:
> https://listi.jpberlin.de/mailman/listinfo/smartmontools-support
> 
> 
>>
>> Does anyone know why? In my case, this actually matters because I'm 
>> not sure how to elevate and/or drop privileges in Cygwin, as sudo 
>> doesn't work due to it not being Unixy underneath.
> 
> To drop privileges, try 'cygdrop' tool from 'cygutils-extra' package.
> 
> 

Thanks.

I can confirm that this only seems to be an issue in QEMU - it's a disk 
controller and/or driver issue as you suggested it might be.

cygdrop will hopefully resolve my issue.

Hamish