Real Documents have become Aliases - how to fix?

Question

I'm helping a friend who's MacBook Pro had a huge number of bad blocks and Apple had to replace the drive. She has an external backup drive she had been manually drag and drop copying user files (documents and folders) to.
Apple set her new drive up with Mavericks and a new user but did not offer a service to move her hand copied backup of file to the new MBPro drive so she came to me.
But about 60% of these documents have the small alias arrow and when I attempt to open them they say "The original file cannot be found... etc."
They look to be real documents because they are large: 2.4MB, 2.6MB, a folder showing a size of 5.8MB, etc.
With these sizes can they be real Aliases?
If they are not really aliases is there some way to revert them back to their real document types (pdf, images, etc?)
I am using my MacBook Pro with 10.8.5 to look at this external drive. I've also copied the entire drive to another in hopes the files would fix and they did not.
thank you
qb

Answer 1

Still have the disk??? LOL.
The program was from 1991, for System 7 I think. I never even had the disks in the first place -- the program came pre-loaded on an antique Mac I found in a free box somewhere long ago. I have manually transferred the program to all my subsequent computers ever since. Worked like a charm.
In fact, the program (MSWord 5.1a) still functions fine, so even if I could reinstall it, I don't see how that would change things.
I do have a very peculiar side issue that I thought was irrelevant, but which may be relevant after all. Here it is.
Whenever I launch MSWord 5.1a, not one but TWO "Dock-icons" for it appear in the Dock. Weird. I triple-checked and I made sure that there is in fact only one version of the program on the computer. But for reasons I can't fathom, the "Dock-icon" (whatever those are called) for MSWord 5.1a bounces in the dock while starting up, and then a second Dock-icon appears after it starts up. The first original Dock-icon has a black triangle next to it indicating that the program is running, but the second Dock-icon does not have the black triangle. And even stranger, when I quit MSWord 5.1a, the original Dock-icon goes away, but the second one stays in the Dock! Bizarre.
Not sure if this is relevant to the issue, but I thought I should mention it.
Also: perhaps the fact that I did not even have the ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.LaunchServices.UserCache.csstore file is responsible for the problem. Where can I get such a file?