Time Machine Problem after Hard drive replacement

Hi all,

I am new at this so thanks in advance for any help or direction. I am running Mac OS X version 10.6.8 on an iMac and am having troubles with my Time Machine since having my 1 TB hard drive replaced under the Seagate recall. Specifically, the store somehow cloned my drive during the replacement process but now when Time Machine runs it doesn't recognize its prior backups as belonging to itself, starts to perform a full backup and then realizes it runs out of room as shown above.

I am backing up wirelessly to a 2012 dlink network attached storage device and it was working perfectly before having the hard drive replaced. The first time took ages but since was working fine. I have spent 3+ hours on the phone with apple support to no avail (trying to associate the old backups with TM and then just trying to delete them to start over..,) and have since been working through the Pondini pages of troubleshooting TM solutions.

Specifically, I have followed the instructions on http://pondini.org/TM/B6.html going through the green box steps 1-5 successfully first, but then I am unable to complete the process to inherit or associate the old backups (either pink or blue box) due to this error.

If I cannot associate the old backups with this 'new HD computer' then I think that I need to erase all prior backups so that I have room on the NAS to start TM backup from scratch. However, this is problematic as I cannot 'see' the old backups to try to delete them through Time Machine itself as the computer does not see itself as existing on the timeline prior to the HD replacement date. I therefore need a way of deleting the whole thing but clearly not through Finder or Terminal from problems mentioned by doing this in prior posts.

My NAS is partitioned so that all the Time Machine Backups were supposed to be just in one part of the NAS, separate from the stuff we were archiving from several other computers....(I cannot just reformat the entire NAS). From reading many of the Pondini troubleshooting posts I think that I need to do something to delete the whole sparsebundle? and think I have located it (see image below) (although I am not sure if it is the one from my prior successful backups prior to Nov 18 or from the more recent failed attempts).

I am carefully reading http://pondini.org/TM/12.html about deleting but at this point am a bit confused as to the best course of action.

Ideally, I would love to successfully tell TM that it has already backed itself up and that the Backups.backups folder belongs to it and not some other computer, so it can just proceed with updates.

Failing that, I think that I would try to delete all prior backups to free up the entire 1.87 TB that are designated and apple formatted for TM on the NAS and then restart TM from scratch.

Not sure if the Backups.backups folder that I have identified has all the info from before November 18th and then could be used to restore itself as I cannot see it through TM.

Thanks for the advice in advance. I would be grateful for any assistance and I am sure others having their hard drives replaced would also benefit.