Do you have a bookmark or history item on that disk? You can use the Library window to search for and delete it. If that doesn't surface it, hmm, how did you discover it and does that tool provide insight into what table it's in?

Other possible causes could be downloaded files that you saved to this location.

You could possibly use a SQLite browsing utility to check the moz_places table and possibly other tables like moz_bookmarks

I found the string "/home-HDD" in history and deleted all occurances. Then I did the same with bookmarks. This would not remove "/home-HDD" from places.sqlite either as shown by running:

LANG=POSIX grep -r /home-HDD .mozilla/firefox/

Binary file .mozilla/firefox/fpefgz51.default-1555692947173/sessionstore-backups/recovery.baklz4 matches Binary file .mozilla/firefox/fpefgz51.default-1555692947173/sessionstore-backups/recovery.jsonlz4 matches Binary file .mozilla/firefox/fpefgz51.default-1555692947173/places.sqlite matches

I think you are going to need a local SQLite program to ferret it out and remove it if Firefox doesn't finish cleaning up references after those history and bookmark deletions.

I ran "zypper install sqlitebrowser" and was overwhelmed by the number of tables, indices and columns . :-) Any idea where to search first for stale information?

I don't know how the indexes work. These are the two key tables:

• moz_places => look in the URL column
• moz_origins => look in the host column

Possibly if you delete something from a table there is a command to update the indexes after that?

This is a web app I use for looking in SQLite databases. As far as I know, it cannot update the table on disk, but you can use it for querying the tables if you know some SQL:

(A) Open https://inloop.github.io/sqlite-viewer/

(B) Click in the center to launch a file browser to open a backup copy of places.sqlite

(C) Replace the listed SELECT query with one of these, change mozilla to your string of interest, then click Execute to list the results (and repeat with the second one):

• SELECT * FROM 'moz_places' WHERE url like '%mozilla%'

• SELECT * FROM 'moz_origins' WHERE host like '%mozilla%'

The query will return rows with their id numbers, which might be useful as a cross-reference to your tool.

jscher2000 said

I don't know how the indexes work. These are the two key tables:

• moz_places => look in the URL column
• moz_origins => look in the host column

Possibly if you delete something from a table there is a command to update the indexes after that?

sqlitebrowser indeed allows to delete data and write back to places.sqlite. But found nothing related to /home-HDD.

What really puzzles me:

- Don't need to invoke Firefox for waking up the sleeping HDD.

- Invoking sqlitebrowser and opening its file dialog also starts the disk. Seems to be a KDE desktop configuration problem.

Sorry for being too fast.