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.
--
Regards,
Christian
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