Real Documents have become Aliases - how to fix?

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