Time Machine error after restoring all data

Sorry, I've tried to run through various trouble shooting guides on Time Machine (notably here http://pondini.org/TM/C4.html etc) but haven't been able to work out a solution.
I just had my iMac harddrive replaced and earlier did a full restore of the harddrive from my Time Machine backup drive.
Time Machine, rather than deleting the old backups on the disk, is now giving me the error message
"This backup is too large for the backup disk. The backup requires 564.63 GB but only 521.89 GB are available."
I backed up to Snow Leopard 10.6.8. I just upgraded to Mountain Lion 10.8.3 because there were a couple of comments online that suggested that might help resolve the problem (unfortunately it didn't)
It seems from articles I've read that this is a known issue that occassonally happens when a full restore happens and Time Machine can't associate the new harddrive with the old backups.
One solution seems to be to use disk utility to reformat the external harddrive and start again, but that seems slightly like using a sledgehammer to smash a nut. Is there a less dramatic solution? Is there a easy way to just associate the two drives with one another again?
Many thanks in advance for any help you can offer, and apologies if I've missed a relevant/ helpful thread somewhere else on the board.

"Reconnecting" to your backups

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