Have the drive from the non-booting Mac mounted on a Linux machine and am copying the images and movies off. Apparently many of the files don't contain EXIF data, so it's kinda important to maintain file creation dates… which means this copy process is taking a while.
@matigo It's not staying powered up for any length of time. It's one of those "more expensive to fix than it's worth" propositions.
In any case I have backups as well as the actual drive, so I haven't really lost anything. It's just not as easy to access at the moment.
I think my Mac Book Pro from 2009 has finally bit the bucket. Which means: setting up a PC with iTunes to back up my iPhones. ?
@larand there are some parts of the administration interface which don't work very well on a mobile device, but Cappuccino works ok.