So many problems! Error messages. Please read and help if you can

From everything I'm reading, data from a failed drive in a RAID0 configuration can't really be recovered due to the nature of the beast. The reason is, parts of a file is written to one drive, while the rest of the file is written to the other drive. So, any data recovered from the failed drive would be incomplete, needing the rest of it from the other drive.

http://www.dell.com/support/article/...top-pc?lang=EN

RAID0
Striped Disk Array with no Fault Tolerance - Provides data striping - spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disks, but no redundancy. This improves performance but puts all data at risk in the event of a disk failure. The drawback to this method is if one drive fails, then all data in the array - both disks are lost. The only benefit to this method is it speeds write times to the drive which makes your system quicker and it keeps the full size of the disks.

If that store tells you they can recover your data, they would be wrong.

If a drive no longer shows in BIOS, it would take a professional data recovery service to "try" and recover anything. But you'd still only have parts of everything - in other words, it would be useless.

I am truly sorry.

One thing you could try:
Replace the SATA cable to the drive, and see if it shows in BIOS.

Squibbler said:

What if the disk controller has gone and not the disks though?
is that a possibility?

It's always a possibility. Do you use a controller card, which can be swapped out to check this?

Looks like maybe his BIOS settings, somehow, got messed up. Try to reset the BIOS to factory default, from within the BIOS. There's an option for it, all have it.

Squibbler said:

I dont have controller cards and SATA cables lying around. I am hoping the data retrieval guys will. I have seen stories of people getting data back from Raid 0 if the raid can be recreated or found again and if the raid data on the drives itself is not corrupted. Will see what these guys say. There seem to be a fair few companies to try locally...may cost me a couple of hundred pounds though

Good luck to you, Squibbler. If you can, let us know how it all works out.