Replaced internal hard drive, time machine doesn't recognize as same volume

Howdy,
The hard drive (call it drive "X") on my iMac (one of the 2005 models) was dying so I had it replaced. I rebuilt the new drive (drive "Y") from my most recent time machine backup (from external drive "A"). I am now having problems with one of my backup devices, in that time machine doesn't recognize that the new disk is conceptually the same thing that had been backed up before (same volume name).
More details... I rotate my backups monthly through three external drives (I store the most recent offsite). After the disk replacement and restore process, I continued to use that backup drive (drive "A") without noticing any problem. Then it came time to rotate my external drives, and time machine doesn't find enough space on the next backup drive (drive "B"). Presumably this is because it doesn't realize that the drive I am backing up ("Y") is a copy of the drive that had previously been backed up on "B" ("X").
Is there any way to convince it they are the same? Or am I in the same boat as this poster:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2770362&tstart=0
Basically I just want to verify that I am in that same boat before I remove old backup files on "B". If I do decide I need to remove those, are the instructions linked in thread 2770362 correct, or are there better ones?
Thanks for any help,
Bob H

Actually, the backup I deleted above was the backup for the new internal drive. Apparently TM had created the (incomplete) backup during the failed attempt that ran out of space on the backup device. Since the new internal drive had the same name as the old internal drive, I didn't initially realize that's what I was deleting. Not that deleting it causes any harm, but it didn't address the original problem of freeing up space on the backup device.
Not to worry though. I've figured out how to get at the backups for the old internal drive, and am in the process of deleting those. I was about to follow the instructions in your troubleshooting items E3 and E2, but upon attempting to enter time machine I stumbled into the right place. Since I had previously told TM to do no backups (because there was still not enough disk space), and since I'd left the backup device connected, when I pulled up the TM menu from the menu bar, the usual "Enter Time Machine" menu was replaced by "Browse Other Time Machine Disks" (or perhaps "Disks" was "Backups"). This then gave me a list of the machines that I'd backed up on this backup device (in my case machine names and internal drive names are the same). Of course one of those was for the old internal drive, and after choosing it I roughly followed the same course of action as I did a few days ago, to initiate deletion.
I also saw how I could delete each of those old backups individually, but decided against that as I did not expect it would free up enough space. My expectation is that nearly all the space is shared among all the backups for the same source drive, since relatively very little changes between backups.
Bob H

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