I Salvaged Font Files Off A Mac HD, How Do I Restore Them To A New Mac?

I thought I could just paste them back into the same directory but, the other mac reads most of the files as Unix files.

Is there some type of system file I need to copy also?

Using Mac OS 10.4 (for previous and current Macs)

How did you do this "salvaging?"

It sounds like this wasn't a simple copy from one to the other. The files may have been corrupted by whatever process you used. It's likely that either the resource fork, or the type/creator code, or both, were not retained.

technologist said:

How did you do this "salvaging?"

It sounds like this wasn't a simple copy from one to the other. The files may have been corrupted by whatever process you used. It's likely that either the resource fork, or the type/creator code, or both, were not retained.

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Our mac os wouldn't boot up, so I attached the hard drive to a usb adapter and plugged it into my pc. I then used Mac Drive read the mac formatted hd to copy the files to an external hd.

Now I'm trying to copy these font files over to our new mac.

What size are the font files, if they are only a few KB then the transfer has stripped the font data out of them

How old was the mac you got them off. You may have to zip the original files first, as that preserves the resource fork, a part of many older mac files that is not recognized and hence ignored by PC file systems

louishen said:

What size are the font files, if they are only a few KB then the transfer has stripped the font data out of them

How old was the mac you got them off. You may have to zip the original files first, as that preserves the resource fork, a part of many older mac files that is not recognized and hence ignored by PC file systems

Click to expand...

Most of the files in the font folder have no extension and come up as 0kb.

The old mac was an imac 20inch, less than 2 years old I think.

Where is this resource fork on the hard drive?

Attatched is the root of the original mac drive in Windows. Do you think there are some hidden files that I can't see even with the MacDrive program?

Yeah, you lost the resource fork.

Mac files can have multiple forks making up a file. (Actually, so can Windows files on NTFS; they're called Streams.) However, Windows Explorer only reads the primary stream, or data fork. If you use Windows Explorer to copy a file, it will strip out all the resources/streams.

Mac fonts often consist entirely of resources outside the data fork.

You need to connect the disk to a real Macintosh to recover those fonts. If you want to save them on a PC, you can pack them into a Zip archive or disk image (DMG) on the Mac first.