Prohibitory sign preventing boot after time machine restore

Long story short I stuck a second 240GB SSD in my Macbook Pro and raided them together. Restored from Time Machine, which was 'successful' but cannot boot (Apple chime sound, loads slow, then pops up with no entry prohibitory sign, which occasionally switches to and from the apple logo).

I've tried:

Done a fresh install of Lion and El Capitan which both work perfectly. But really that's still no help as all my stuff is backed up with time machine which I cannot get to.

I've tried repairing and other things within disk utility in recovery mode.

I've tried the time machine restore around 3-4 times just to be sure.

I tried a few terminal commands which at this time I genuinely cannot remember but they didn't help anyway.

Long-ish story. I bought a second 240gb ssd to raid 0 with my current one, same make/model. So that I can get more storage and better performance. I already had a time machine back up which I used often especially since I was planning to use it to restore everything. Something that slowed me down was that the El Capitan update had seemed to had removed the raid options from disk utility but I read that you can do it just the same using terminal however, I wasn't able to unmount the boot drive of course to do this, so I made a bootable usb to load the OS on so that I could unmount both drives, wipe them, and set them up together, which worked great (shows up right, everything working, no issues). So at this point I'm ready to open up recovery mode and restore using time machine, which came up showing mt TM HDD, let me select the raid storage to restore to, took around 2hrs to restore which then led to the prohibitory sign. at first I thought I didn't have permission? or something like that, but I read that it's most likely something's corrupt, such as some OS files, as it said the restore was successful but it cannot boot (and as it didn't come up with a 'question marked file' icon, meaning it is detecting the boot drive)...

So really I don't know what else to try, and it takes so long to try different things that i'd really like to be going in the right direction. I'm sure I've missed details out, so please ask anything...

Any advice?