A System Administrator initializes new database devices with the disk init command, which:
Maps the specified physical disk device or operating system file to a database device name
Lists the new device in master..sysdevices
Prepares the device for database storage
Before you run disk init, see the installation documentation for your platform for
information about choosing a database device and preparing it for
use with Adaptive Server. You may want to repartition the disks
on your computer to provide maximum performance for your Sybase
databases.
disk init divides the database devices into allocation units. The size of the allocation unit depends on which logical page size your server is configured for (2, 4, 8, or 16K). In each allocation unit, the disk init command initializes the first page as the allocation page, which will contain information about the database (if any) that resides on the allocation unit.
WARNING! After you run the disk init command, dump the master database. This makes recovery easier and safer in case master is damaged. See Chapter 28, “Restoring the System Databases.”
