Resolved Have question about formating a thumb drive with an old recovery program on it

I have WIN11 on my HP Envy desktop. Is it safe to insert this unused 32gb old thumb into my tower and go to Devices & drives and left click on Format? I've never formatted anything before and want to make sure that I don't wind up replacing WIN11 with the old WIN8 software that's on the thumb drive. Or should I just buy a new flash drive? I will be using this thumb drive to store personal Word documents on it.

If I can format this thumb drive, I understand I should chose NTFS rather than FAT32?

 

Hi Annie Lori, yes you can Format an old thumb drive in your comp.
You will be able to do this just by inserting the drive into your designated USB port when your comp is in normal operation.
It should open in File Explorer and will be shown on the left menu with a designated Alpha letter eg. "E" or "F".
Right click on that and you can >Format> and if you have the option ExFAT is a good one to use.

Warning: Do NOT load your USB drive before starting your comp.
It may then try to run from the USB drive!! Which you don't want to happen.