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What to do when Settings will not open on your iPhone?

My daughter complained about not being to launch the Settings menu from her iPhone11. She has restarted multiple times already. I looked at the obvious like resetting making sure screentime is disabled on her account and tried ways to reset without losing her photos and videos. Everything I tried required access to the Settings menu. I was sure it wasn’t a hardware issue but a software configuration issue. The second part of my troubleshooting involved wiping the phone and restoring from backup in order to rule out the hardware issue theory. To do this, I used iTunes on my Windows computer and connected the iPhone to my computer using usb cable. In order to perform backup, the local storage on your C drive has to have sufficient disk storage to accommodate the total size of photos and videos on the iPhone. This is where most of my problem was. The backups are stored on these paths: \Users\(your username)\Apple\MobileSync\Backup\  or \Users\(your username)\AppData\Roaming\Apple Comp...

MacBook Pro boots up showing a folder with a flashing question mark

This dreaded flashing question mark inside a folder means that the startup disk is no longer able to find a Mac operating system to boot from. There are a few things you can try to do to fix this yourself.

Reboot MacBook pro and then hold the Command (⌘) and R keys on your keyboard to startup from the macOS Recovery. I did this and was able to go through disk diagnostics telling me that there were some disk errors. I proceeded to fix what I could but found that on subsequent reboots to macOS Recovery showed different partition errors. Sometimes the disk utility completed successfully but other times it would stop repairing even if left overnight.





If you did have a failing disk drive, the marked errors would be consistent and multiple passes will bypass these marked errors. I had erratic results however which led me to believe it may or may not be a bad disk. The next investigation should be to look at the disk drive connections to the SATA controller.

Open the MacBook pro and take a look at the disk drive. Once opened, I removed the drive, took the make and model of the drive in case I needed to purchase a replacement, and placed it back in. I noticed that it was a little loose on and that re-seating it made it more secure.  I powered it back on normally to see if it would find the Mac operating system and voila, it did.


If it didn't work, the final fix would be to replace the drive and reinstall the Mac operating system from scratch. So you better have the installation media and backups of your files to restore from. Failing that, bring it over to us and we can take care of it for you.

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