How to get the drive a file is on (was Re: /bin/pwd, cygpath -wa fail under native symlink)

I need to find out the drive on which some files reside. I need to make some links from a tmp dir to the files from a script. So I need to determine where they reside so I can figure out which tmp dir to use. Hard links, not running as administrator. I tried cygpath -wa and /bin/pwd. They

/bin/pwd, cygpath -wa fail under native symlink

(CYGWIN_NT-6.1 spirit 3.1.1(0.340/5/3) 2019-12-18 09:28 x86_64 Cygwin, win7) The windows root is C:, cygwin root is on F:. A native symlink under C: that points into F: gets an incorrect result from cygpath -wa. Notice that when the current directory is the target of the symlink then the result