You might need to start with at least 2 drives, one being parity, the reason being I believe unraid need a baseline system to start with. I'm not sure what post you're referring to about no parity drive but I know you don't need one if you have a built array and the drive fails. You can then still mount your array and transfer data, it will just be unprotected. Do you have any spare drives lying around, any size will do?
Does the main page have the option to restore the array instead of starting it? It would be right below START but you would need to check the box 'I'm sure I want to do this'
If so you could try that. As for formating that is taken care of after you start the array and all the disks are mounted. I think your endless mounting loop is because you only having one drive. It's possible you don't have a correct setting in bios for your the drive and that is causing it as well.