Usually the drives store a copy of the configuration. On hardware RAID setups the config is stored both in the controller and on the disks, if there is a mismatch the controller will ask which configuration you want to load. On on-board RAID the configuration should be on the drives also,
If it was RAID1 and the data was important to you I would take a single drive and back it up to something else (or someone else's computer temporarily). If you select the wrong setting trying to resync the array you could easily lose the data. If it was RAID0 then your data is toast, more than likely.