Updating Emily's 3GS to 4.1 - crash

I waited until 4.1 to be safe, but when I tried to update Emily's 3GS it was a disaster.

The phone went into recovery mode. Of course I forgot to pull photos off it, so I fear any on the phone will be lost.

Stupid of me not to pull the photos off.

So how often does the 4.1 update bork a 3GS?

Update: I was wrong. Backup does include photo and video. iTunes did an initial restore of the firmware (to 4.1 actually) then it let me restore from backup and we have the photos. I can think of a few reasons why her phone blew up

1. As it was doing the upgrade I plugged in another phone to iTunes. This is not normally a problem. iTunes can normally manage multiple connected iPhones. The upgrade pear shaped within a second, probably less than a second, of plugging in the other iPhone.
2. I used to sync this phone with a different account with a shared .Mac ID. I'd moved it over (separate post why) to a family account with the same .Mac ID, but I hadn't bothered to replace the music.

Update: With Tim's 3G iphone, which has always been synchronized to this account, I got an "error occurred while restoring this iPhone" during the 4.1 update. I think there's another reason for that however.