Failed RAID 0 Wiped drive data

Some better file recovery tools can recover the data into folders, but often it comes out a bit of a mess. You are best to just start sorting through it piece by piece.

Almost certainly not.

The path info is a whole separate set of data. Each individual file does not know or care where it lives (or used to live).

MiniTools. But you still won't know which is which or where it goes. Forget about apps - you can install them again. Just focus on data - and only data you really need.

I have searched out files like that before. Many times. Windows can sort them by file type and its easy to go through from there.

Nope. When you formatted the hard disk drive it overwrote the bulk of the filesystem's organizational structure. Most installations do quick formats rather than full formats so the rest of the drive data including block allocations and the file data itself remained intact and would have remained so until the new filesystem was acted upon.

In other words, the data is still there, but the hierarchy that it was stored in is gone.

In the future, use the Intel RST software package to create the firmware RAID. The RST software package (specifically the Windows UI) has knowledge of the NTFS filesystem and can safely expand a non-RAID volume to a RAID-0 volume while preserving the data on one of the two drives. This cannot be done through the simple BIOS or UEFI ROMs that are accessed before the operating system boots.

Intel's Chipset RAID is considered a firmware assisted software RAID. It is not a full hardware RAID in the same sense as a hardware RAID provided by an LSI RAID Controller.

The firmware assisted part exposes the RAID configuration to the BIOS/UEFI firmware before the operating system has booted and had a chance to load its own drivers. This allows a firmware assisted software RAID volume to be bootable provided that the operating system has supporting drivers to take over with.

True hardware RAID controllers have no problem with this because they expose purely logically addressed volumes to the firmware from the moment that the computer is up and running. The state, configuration, and management of the volumes and related storage devices is purely the concern of the RAID controller. It does not matter what combination of storage devices is used to create the logically addressed volumes because the BIOS/UEFI firmware doesn't care, managing the storage devices is the job of the RAID controller's firmware and microprocessor.

A traditional software RAID has a chicken and egg problem. The BIOS boot procedure inspects the first logical address of the (MBR) to determine if it is a valid boot target and passes execution to it if it is. The UEFI boot procedure inspects the device's partition table (GPT) and selects an appropriate boot partition if one is found. A volume that is the result of a software RAID will behave like a regular disk before the operating system is loaded and thus not have data in the places expected by the BIOS or UEFI firmware. This throws a logical wrench in the boot sequence.

The consequence of this is that in order to load a filesystem located on a traditional software RAID, the operating system must first be up and running. This means that the operating system itself must not be on a traditional software-RAID volume. There are a couple of workarounds for this.

First, use a boot ROM to present the storage devices to the BIOS/UEFI firmware in a way that it can understand before it attempts to read boot data from the devices. This is what Intel RST does.

Second, use a small non-RAID boot volume to hold a boot driver which can interpret the software RAID. The firmware selects the small boot volume which in turn loads the software-RAID driver, which allows the operating system to be booted from a software-RAID volume. I believe that Microsoft's Dynamic Disk technology works like this.

EDIT: to actually answer your question, the Windows RST software suite and the preboot RAID environment both configure the same thing. The Windows RST software suite is simply much, much more robust.