Time Machine disk not recognised

My G5 PowerMac has been away for repair; it's needed a new logic board. It was away for nearly two weeks. Now Time Machine doesn't recognise the external drive which contains the Time Machine backups from last November. It wants to do a backup from scratch and says there isn't enough space on the disk.
Is there any way of getting the Time Machine to recognise the previous backups and start adding to them?
I'll be very grateful for any advice.

To TM, it is a different computer. The logic board includes your Ethernet "Mac Address", which is a unique number that TM uses to be sure it knows which Mac is which.
There is a fairly elaborate way to attempt to persuade TM that the existing backups really are for your "new" Mac: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080128003716101
It is very easy for the inexperienced user of Terminal (and the not-so-inexperienced as well) to make an error with Terminal, get no error message, and have it not work, so try it at your own risk.
But there is an alternative: hold down the Option key while selecting the TM icon in your Menubar. The +Enter Time Machine+ option changes to +Browse Other Time Machine Disks.+ That's a bit misleading, but it will take you into the normal TM interface where you can see and restore from the old set of backups.
Even if you're successful with the Terminal work, your first backup with the new logic board may be a full one -- every file and folder on your system. If TM decides to do that, you cannot prevent it.
So if your TM disk/partition isn't at least 2.5 times the size of the data it's backing-up, your best bet may be to just erase it with Disk Utility and let TM start over.

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