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 Computer\MobileSync\Backup 

The backups will be saved into subfolders with this format below and the folder size will be the be the same size as your iPhone photo and videos combined. There will be multiple folders here of the same size corresponding to all the backups done. The folders are not self-healing and does not clean after itself so it’s up to you  to purge folders after some time, like this one below:

00001234-0012345678901234

Unfortunately, my C drive is almost fully used up and for most OSes, your default roaming profile path is going to be on the C drive. The iPhone backup once it started took about 30 minutes to complete but does not indicate that the backup succeeded or if it failed. When trying to restore from that incomplete backup, the iTunes response was a generic failed message, and this message did not come up until waiting close to 30 minutes. I had to dig deeper to find out I ran out of disk space. It wasn't from looking at logs, but I just realized my storage was in the red. I cleared some disk space by uninstalling unused applications using WinDirStat and deleting all temporary files. Thankfully I had a data partition where I could temporarily move some file to, so I moved the biggest folders from my \Program Files folder. Failed backups do no roll back and clear the folders, so you have to go to the MobileSync backup folder and delete the failed backup folder to ensure you have enough disk space to complete a full backup.

Once I had a successful backup completed, you have to disable FindMyPhone on the device if it was enabled as you will not be able to overwrite onto the iPhone with it enabled. Do this by logging into the Apple iCloud account and remove the device. This will allow us to use the iTunes restore button to overwrite from backup. 

Keep the iPhone plugged into the computer with the usb cable while the iPhone reboots, factory resets itself, and restores from backup. This is where sufficient disk space on the C drive is critical. It downloads the full backup first in its compressed format. After downloading it, the folder is uncompressed into another format prior to pushing the files across the wire to the iPhone. This doubles the disk free requirements on the host computer so make sure you clear enough for this. You will get prompted on the iPhone to setup as usual like you would a new phone, but know that the restore process will run in the background recovering photos, videos, and all your applications are reinstalled. 

The Settings menu now works after a restore so that proves the issue was software related instead of hardware, saving me from having to buy my daughter another phone. Regardless, I find out a week later that she went out to spend $250 of her own money to buy her friend’s iPhone 13. All this work was for naught but it did provide some good content for this blog I hope.