Reinstating Replication on a subscriber automatically

Hi all

I am setting up a system using SQL Server 2005 replicating to both SQL Express and MSDE clients. My question is this - if a client PC has been rebuilt - i.e. new hard disk etc, how can I automatically make that machine realise that it is already a subscriber of a SQL Server database and for it to automatically get a snapshot?

I hope this makes sense, thanks for your help.

D

If the subscriber has the same name as the old one, the SQL Server version of the subscriber is the same as the old one, and the history or distribution retention period has not passed you merely need to restore the subscriber database and the distributor will backfill the missing commands.

If this is not the case you should try to do a no-sync and then a validation to determine what is missing, or how out of sync you are. At that point you might want to evaluate re-initializing.sql