"invalid raid set" How to recover mirrored set??

[Bugs01]

I hate to bother everyone with a "how do I...?" post but I just can't figure out how the raid controller works (or rather why it isn't working) on the A7N8X Deluxe (rev 1.04)

I could explain how I got to this point if necessary but I suspect you've heard enough similar stories to get the idea. So I'll just skip ahead a little bit...

So I installed the new battery...
at which point I was able to boot from a floppy, flash the bios and finaly end the year-long nightmare of unexplainable problems.

Now only one issue remains.
My raid 1 mirrored set no longer seems to recognise.
Both the hard drives are detected properly, and the error "incomplete raid set" which I so often got false alarms about in the past doesn't appear. Instead it proceeds to boot from a floppy (if available) with no sign that it's even trying to recognise a raid set.

In the built-in raid utility, my drives are listed under set 0 (invalid raid set)
"rebuild raid set" doesn't work, it says there are no mirrored sets.
"resolve conflicts" doesn't work, it says there are no conflicts!

So just what is it that makes this raid set "invalid"??
...and why can't I just boot from one of the drives on it's own as I could in the past?

The only thing I could think of is that perhaps the raid controler, in addition to placing metadata on the disks themselves, also stored settings somewhere else like the cmos. Somewhere where the data was lost when I flashed the bios and cleared the cmos. That would at least go a bit towards explaining how a dying battery caused SOME of the problems it did. If that were the case, then I figured maybe erasing the metadata on the disk might allow it to recognise as a normal sata drive which would then allow me to recover the data from it. Since I had two drives with identical information on them I figured I had one 'free shot' to try, and even if it left the data unrecoverable I still had the other disk. So I entered the raid utility with only one of the disks connected and chose "delete raid set"

It did work... sort of. It worked like I thought, like I feared it would.
The drive now recognises as an empty, unpartitioned drive.

Now I have only one more try I think, so I come to you for help.
Could someone please tell me how to recover the data off this drive?