Using Drush site-install with multisite and a single database I am trying to make a script that will create and configure a new multisite in a drupal 7 install using drush 5.8.

I have scripted creating the site folder and settings.php file manually and adding the database information (to get around a bug i was having with --db-url and sql server).

I am setting the dbprefix to be $newSite so that all the tables can live in the same database.
The first thing drush site-install tries to do is drop ALL the tables in the database. This includes all the tables created with a different prefix in a previous install.

Is there any way to stop this from happening?

Thanks for your help in advance!

Joe
this is how I do mine...

drush -y site-install standard --db-url=mysql://$username:$pass@127.0.0.1:3306/$dbname --site-name="$sitename" --sites-subdir="$sitename"

sitename for instance could be test.drupalserver.com and to keep it in good practice for dbs i strip out the periods and the $dbname would be test_drupalserver_com.

I believe the way my drush command works, it creates a new db that matches the name of the site.