Unfortunately I already tried this, and at least with one utility (ioscan on HP-UX), adding the group the utility was in did not help, and adding the group assigned to the block device it was trying to read from also did nothing. In fact, documentation I found for ioscan stated it had to be run as root. (I realize this is getting HP-UX specific at this point, but I know I had this problem with some Linux commands as well -- I believe that lshal can only be run as root per it's documentation)