Particle system is not rendering!

Okay, so I have this character that I made that had a great particle ( hair) system. Under the modifier panel, I applied my particle system into an object. I thought it would give me better control over the hair… the problem is… The hair does not show up when I render it!! I checked in edit mode, and all the hair were strings of vertices… so I extruded them a little bit, and it showed up. But, that also doubled the vertices in the hair “mesh” … Is there any way I can conver the hair back to a particle system WITHOUT losing the particle mode edit data??? Thanks!