Time Machine over WiFi with Airport Extreme

I have had an iMac for 5 years with a WD 500 gb drive hardwired (Firewire 400) into the machine for use with Time Machine. I just got a new Macbook Pro 15". When I opened the machine, I migrated everything over from my old iMac using the Time Machine Backups drive. Everything was working fine and TM recognized all of my old backups.
A couple days later, I wanted to up the portability of the laptop so I plugged my drive in USB to my Airport Extreme. The Macbook immediately recognized the shared drive and every put a little "Time Machine Backups" icon mounted on the desktop. I went into the Time Machine preferences and designated the network drive as my backup drive. It seemed to be working but the first time it went to backup, it created a new .sparsebundle file, even though I still have the Backups folder full of the old backups. It then tried to create another .sparsebundle file with the same name as my computer but with a 1 at the end.
I went to my local Genius bar and the guy plainly said "Time Machine does not work wirelessly unless its a time capsule. (Sarcastically) The only people who can answer that question are the software engineers who designed Time Machine".
The fact that Time Machine and the MBP immediately recognized the wireless drive as a backup disk tells me that its possible to do it. Is there anyway to tell Time Machine to include all of the backups on the drive and not to start from scratch??
Thanks.

iliv4apl wrote:
But I was not using a new backup drive, it was the same drive, just different connection. How do I tell it to incorporate the backup files on the drive into the time machine program?
You can't. Time Machine stores it's backups differently when they're done over a network, and you can't switch between the two.
You might be able to copy the "local" backups to be used over the network. See #18 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
And you need to know that backing up with Time Machine to a USB drive connected to an Airport Extreme is "iffy" and +*not supported by Apple.+* See Using Time Machine with an Airport Extreme Air Disk (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

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