HT3275 Time Machine says my external hard drive does not have enough

Time Machine says my external hard drive does not have enough space for the current backup.  It needs 34 G out of a 250G hard drive.  All that is on the drive is earlier backups.  I recently added memory, which may confuse Time Machine into thinking it is a new computer.  How can I erase old backups and complete this one?

Walter Goodman wrote:
Time Machine says my external hard drive does not have enough space for the current backup.  It needs 34 G out of a 250G hard drive.  All that is on the drive is earlier backups.
See #C4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting. 
If that doesn't clear it up, how much data is on your Mac?  If TM is only trying to back-up 34 GB, it should be able to delete old backups to do that (assuming you're running Lion).
It sounds like your backups may be corrupted.  Try to repair them, per #A5 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
I recently added memory, which may confuse Time Machine into thinking it is a new computer.
If that's all you did, no.  
How can I erase old backups and complete this one?
Just erase the drive per #1 or #2 of Using Disk Utility.

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