Unable to Access Settings Screen - Contacts Lost

Question

I have an iPhone 5c 16GB. I updated to iOS 8.0.1 last week and there didn't seem to be any issues. My iPhone is backed up via iCloud on a daily basis through wifi in my apartment. This morning I woke up and saw that my contacts on my iPhone were all gone. I went into the settings screen because I wanted to make sure iCloud had backed them up. When I got into the iCloud screen I saw that contacts, notes, calendar etc. were now off, i.e. iCloud was not backing them up. The settings screen then went blank and I was back at the home screen. I turned off the power and restarted my phone and clicked on settings. The settings screen came on for one second and then defaulted back to the home screen. I could not access any of the settings. I logged into iCloud on my computer and saw that contacts were backed up from my address book but some of my notes were gone. The calendar was fine, though. There were none of my apps in my iCloud account.
I couldn't get a Genius Bar appt anywhere today so I went into the AT&T store. They played around with the phone but had no idea what happened. They suggested I take it to the Apple store. I was going to upgrade to the iPhone 6 next month anyways so I figured I would do that today. AT&T didn't have any iPhone 6 16GB in stock so I was told to come back during the week. They suggested I plug in my current iPhone into iTunes and sync it to see if I could get back the contacts. When I did that I was instructed to download iOS 8.0.2. I downloaded and installed it. I still had the same problem, though...the settings screen would not remain open. I created a vcard and PDF backup of my contacts (via web-version of iCloud) but some important notes from notepad were no longer there. They're not in iCloud and not on my iPad. I'm thinking that my iPhone is still backing up via iCloud but since contacts, notes, calendar, etc. were unchecked (how they got unchecked I have no idea), the backups are basically of nothing. When I get the iPhone 6 and want to set it up using my iCloud account I'm wondering if any of my contacts, apps, calendar, notes, etc. will be restored. Have I lost this information forever?
Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

It sounds like something is corrupted.
Just as a test, there's a way to open the settings wizard from the command line.  For instance, this command would open XP Mode's settings from the default location:
vpcsettings.exe “C:\Users\[USERID]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Virtual PC\Virtual Machines\Windows XP Mode.vmc"
(replacing USERID with the correct user ID)
If that works, there is a way to reset the mappings.
Bob Comer