Intel RST RAID 5 Recovery From BIOS Reset

[firefirefire]

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H170N-WIFI
BIOS Version: F22e
RAID System: Intel RST
Drives: (4) Intel 540s Series 2.5" 1TB SSD

Hi, I have a classic story of messing up my Intel RST capable BIOS and causing 2 RAID disks to become non-RAID, leaving me with a "Failed" RAID 5 array.

I have seen this thread (viewtopic.php?t=5947) where user garami lists out the steps that is needed to recover from such a situation. However, I would like to make some more confirmations before I go ahead with these 8 steps.

1. Uninstall Intel RST from Windows. This step is critical! If you do not do this, you will lose all your data when you get to step (4)!

For my situation, the RAID array that I'm trying to recover was my boot drive, and it is unreachable now so I can't remove RST from its Windows 10 install. I'll be doing the recovery using another fresh Windows 10 install (no RST). Do I still need to worry about losing data due to RST software in this situation? Also does the fact that the RAID array used to be a boot drive change anything?

2. Reboot into the RAID console, reset all member disks to be non-member

Are empty RAID arrays removed automatically from the list once all members are gone?

3. Create a new array with the exact same parameters (name, stripe size) as the original one
4. Reboot into Windows, run TestDisk, start "Quick Search"
5. Stop Quick Search immediately after it has started, immediately start the "Deeper Search" - chosen EFI GPT
6. Wait until Deeper Search had found the correct partition (should take under 10 seconds), stop it from scanning
7. Mark the partition as Primary, write partition data to it
8. Reboot into Windows and everything should be hunky dory!

Steps 3 through 8 seems straightforward. After the eighth step, assuming things are hunky dory, the array should be bootable again, is that correct?

I apologize for the naivety of these questions as I am totally inexperienced in this. I tried to find the original thread where garami found these 8 steps but couldn't find it.

[firefirefire]

So seeing as there is no reply telling me not to go ahead with this, I tried it out. I got got to step 6 and encoutered the same "The harddisk seems too small!" message. I recreated the array from 64KB to 128KB strip size and that message is gone.

I am trying to recover this partition labelled "Intel" (make it bootable), and quick search finds a "Intel" partition that does look correct (size looks right and the last edit time on the top level folder is just when the array configuration got lost). But seeing as TestDisk doesn't recognize any folders or files in the partition, I don't know what to do next. Any suggestions?

The various screen looks like this:

[firefirefire]

This is the log file.

testdisk.log.zip

testdisk.log

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