How to restore, associate, ??? Time Machine backups prior to HD going bad?

Greetings.  I hope someone can help me. Soon. Real soon!
So on our office iMac we have an external HD for time machine.
Last week the HD inside the iMac failed.  I guess it was one that had been identified by Apple as in a bad crop..... so Apple kindly replaced the failed drive.
But here is my problem:  We were previously running on Mountain Lion.  One of the major apps we use is a Windows app that runs under Parallels.
When the HD was replaced, the Tech who did the work I guess did not realize we have a Time Machine.  So he put in the new disk and installed Mavericks on it.  He said he recovered as much off the failed disk as possible, but we see nothing from before.
Anyway, so now the computer's name is different. The OS is different. Only the HD has the same name: Macintosh HD and of course, all the hardware is what we had previously, except the HD.
So when the computer was put back into service, Time Machine was turned on. :-(
We had a bear of a time reinstalling Parallels and a newer version of Windows than what we had before.
We can access the data that was on the old Time Machine backups via the Finder, except the critical information we need from the backups resides in on the virtual C: drive that mounts when that Parallels app [used to] runs.
If I try to recover or Migrate from the Time Machine drive, the only backup files that are available to me are those that have been made since the HD replacement.
Is the ANY WAY to turn back the clock to restore from the OLD TM backups?
I tried using the tmutil associatedisk command in Terminal, but that seems to have not done anything for me either.
Any assistance or advice would REALLY REALLY be greatly appreciated!

Have a look at this thread I posted in earlier and the various links in Pondini's excellent Time Machine resource I linked to:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/20367932#20367932

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