Newbie Question about Resource Forks

Hi all, I'm somewhat new to using a mac for creating audio files (or any files for that matter). I'm using the Soundminer software to add metadata to a few thousand audio tracks, and then I've burned MP3, AIFF and WAV versions of all of the files.

Since my MacBook has a small hard drive, I burned the new audio files onto an external USB drive which was previously formatted in FAT (windows) format. Upon viewing the files on my Windows PC, I noticed that all of the WAV & AIFF files were now accompanied by a resource fork file with a similar name "._filename.wav". Strangely enough, most (but not all) of the MP3 files that were created also had resource fork files, but I'm not sure why they all didn't.

After doing some research online, it appears that this happened because the files were created onto a FAT drive instead of the drive being formatted in HFS.

So here's what I'm wondering.... If I simply copy all of the files (including the resource forks) to another drive formatted in HFS, will Mac OSX put the resource fork files back into the original files and fix this issue of having the extra resource fork files, or to be safe should I reburn the files from scratch to a new HFS drive? (not a big deal if I have to since Soundminer is good a batch copier)

In case it matters, the purpose of burning these files was to be distributed to production studios, so this is not something I'm doing just to put on my ipod or the like. I want to make sure everything is proper.

Also, anyone know why about 10% of my newly created MP3 files did not end up with a resource fork? I thought that was rather strange and cannot seem to find any pattern as to why some of them do not have this. All of the same tracks in WAV & AIFF do indeed have them.

Thanks for any help, Eric

Thanks so much for your answer. One more question if you don't mind....

I had researched this a little before posting and had read that some mac software programs actually store information in the resource fork. I have no idea about Soundminer, but since Soundminer is a Mac only program, and since its purpose is to add metadata to sound files, are you sure that nothing important will be lost if I copy these back over to an HFS drive? Perhaps I'm being OCD about this but I want to make sure the Mac will put the resource fork and data fork parts back together into single files and not keep it split. I'm thinking in the future I should stick with HFS drives only when I use Soundminer. I would have done that originally if I had realized this could be an issue.