rebuild a tm archive moved by cp

Hello,

I moved the whole Backups.backupdb directory from an external HDD to another (internal) HDD.

The reason was that I had to re-initialize the backup HDD, which could not be repaired otherwise by the Disk Utility.

The scheme was to re-initialize the external HDD then move the backup directory back to the external HDD.

Now I know that things would have been simple through a block type copy, using Disk Util to create an image and then restore from this image.

But ... I did the move using cp -pPR to the internal HDD (after removing the restrictive ACLs from the backup directory).

The internal HDD is formatted in Apple GUID partition table, and I copied on a Journaled HFS Plus volume.

The OS is X.7.5

After the move I noted that the size of the backup directory, once moved to the other HDD, and as shown by finder, was totally erroneous:

about 600 Gb instead of 100 Gb

Perhaps an issue with hard links? The symptoms are similar.

However, I thought OS X.7.5 could handle hard links through cp.

The thing is, 600 Gb is too big to copy back the backup directory to the external HDD.

Moreover, since the hard links are possibly messed up, I think some sort of repair is required to get back the backup as it was.

Another note: as it is now on the internal HDD, Time Machine fonctionalities are available on this backup: I can open and browse through the different snapshots and recover old files. But 600 Gb is definitively too big to keep it as such.

At least if I could recover a few consistent (complete) snapshots, that would be great.

Is there any solution, apart from a fresh restart of time machine?

Thanks for your kind help.

Thierry