I have two windows 7 x64 boxes, one running cygwin x86 and the other
x86_64. I run smartctl on both boxes. One can run smartctl as
administrator or not, but it produces a fuller information set with
admin rights. A recent change to the x86_64 cygwin has broken
administrator use of smartctl as detailed below. It still runs fine on
the x86 cygwin.
I'm not certain which version of cygwin broke the functionality, but it
was working last week.
x86_64 running as ADMIN fails to run smartctl
$ /usr/sbin/smartctl.exe -a /dev/sda
smartctl 6.3 2014-07-26 r3976 [x86_64-unknown-cygwin-win7-sp1]
(cygwin-6.3-1)
Copyright (C) 2002-14, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
Read Device Identity failed: Input/output error
A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more
'-T permissive' options.
$ head /dev/sda
(works)
$