Smartctl issues in Cygwin with elevated terminal

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi there,

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"

But it continues to work fine as a normal user.

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. I'll be happy to try and 
debug this and provide extra details if needed, but I'm not sure what to 
do next on this one.

Cheers,
Hamish