You can't do much until you get the actual report telling you what changes you need to make. You say yourself that you're not sure how reliable your memory is about what they said (understandably - even when a viva goes well it is stressful), so try to give yourself a break until that comes through. The different range of outcomes that are now possible, should be in the PhD examination regulations, which will be somewhere on your university's website somewhere. They vary between universities, so it's best to check the rules for your institution. I think it's worth reading up on that, and looking to see whether your university has anything like a code of best practice for PhD supervision.
When you get your report, sit down with your remaining supervisor (I'm assuming from your post that you still have one just the more relevant one has left?) and go through it. If anything is unclear, then you are allowed usually to ask for clarification from the internal (this might be best done by your supervisor). You are right though that your internal can't get involved in the revision process. It might be that when you see it written down that it's less scary than you think. If there's a real problem about expertise, then be very upfront and ask how it's going to be plugged. It might be that there's a source of non-obvious help e.g. someone in a cognate discipline who uses that method or theory. To be honest, if your former supervisor has left, then the university can't really expect them to continue to work for free for them, but they do need to make sure you have adequate support. You might though have to press them on it. Good luck and I hope the situation feels less bleak when you see the report.

I agree with the majority here that legal action is unlikely to succeed. I am rather surprised that your department has not replaced your supervisor though and think you should press for someone to be appointed to help you with the corrections. Universities are well known as not being great employers, but they appear to be expecting their ex-employee to continue to work for them without pay, rather than accepting their responsibility to you, which seems unreasonable to me for both the ex-supervisor and you as the student.

I would follow your supervisor's advice. Your examiners are clearly on the ball if you got the report so quickly, so there's no reason why you wouldn't get a quick reply.

Yes you can fail your doctorate if you do not do major corrections to the satisfaction of your examiners. The two cases I know of got M.Phil.s in the end. In both cases neither took the corrections seriously (for different reasons) and made minimal revisions (despite having been given a year, which suggests major changes are needed). If you got major corrections, usually both examiners have to sign off on them, so I imagine your supervisor is suggesting running the changes past the internal because she will have a clear sense of what your external didn't like and won't sign off on as well as her own red lines (and regardless of what impression you got at the viva, your internal has a far stronger investment in getting a successful conclusion for you than your external).

I suspect your supervisor might also be trying to slow you down a bit. My guess is that s/he knows you're hurting and not happy at some of the criticisms and impatient for the whole thing to be over, and wants you to get over that feeling a bit before you start to make the changes, so that you do a good job. Could you perhaps write the letter as suggested and then take a holiday to give yourself time away from the thesis? I think you might feel better then about doing the corrections and do a better job, than you will right now, when it's all a bit raw.

Good luck Marasp. I remember you and have my fingers crossed that it's good news.

Hi Timmy,

Try googling ISI journal rankings + your subject. Or if you have a specific journal in mind, go to its homepage and under journal information, there will usually be a bit of information telling you where it is ranked in your discipline and what its impact factor is. Different disciplines often do have their own specialist lists though, so I'd also ask your supervisor if s/he could point you in the right direction of the most used for your subject, or if s/he is not the helpful sort, find out who the REF coordinator was in your department. They will know, having had their ears chewed off for the last few years by the management about why all of their academic staff aren't all publishing in top ten journals all of the time...

Continued: This means that if you want to get a job, you need to be quite strategic in what and where you publish, and so it makes sense to publish in the best place you can.
3) Yes the REF is only for the evaluation of staff research, but as I said if you want to maximise your chances of getting an academic job (given there are an awful lots more PhDs graduating in the UK than there are academic jobs), then you need to understand how it impacts on job applications for people trying to get a first step on the ladder. I know I was very naive myself about this as a PhD student, but I really think it's crucial that PhD students understand how it matters as it can save a lot of heartache in future.
PS I should stress that there is no perfect route to getting an academic job: a lot of luck is involved, but where there are things you can do to help yourself, I think you might as well do so.

I'm in a field where there are no 'postgrad' journals that I've heard of, and the idea seems strange to me, but I would say that if you want an academic career you need to concentrate on publishing in outlets that would be deemed REF-able. There is no advantage in multiple publications in places that will not count, when in the early stages of the REF cycle, one hit in a good journal could make a new PhD a good prospect. Go for quality over quantity. On the 7 month wait, I understand from historian friends that that under a year is regarded as OK, but maybe ask your supervisor what the norm for that journal is, and whether an update request is appropriate or not.

I agree with what everyone has said about the window of opportunity being short. I'd still take the non-academic job though and try to get something published in your spare time. During our PhDs I think we are subtlely conditioned to see a non-academic job as a less desirable outcome and to pretend that academic jobs are much better than they actually are. You might find that when you step into a non-academic job and move away from the 'brainwashing' that actually you love it. If not, a few months of well-paid work is better than being unemployed, and you'd just have to try and overcome the time/motivation problems others have described.

I understand you think treeoflife is being harsh but what I think s/he is trying to point out is that when you chance disciplines, some things are so self-evident to those who work in it, that it wouldn't have dwned on them that you didn't know. I'm a social scientist and I have to say it wouldn't have dawned on me to tell someone that you need ethical approval to essentially experiment on human beings, and as this is such a big thing in pyschology, I think your supervisors would have assumed you either knew or that your research training classes covered it (they certainly do at most universities).
As to your supervisors not caring, well you do realise that if they'd let you go ahead, you almost certainly wouldn't have been able to use that material in either your PhD or any publications. Given all the scandals around social pyschology at the moment, I can't imagine any ethics board would be particularly happy to give retrospective ethics approval. Wouldn't that have been worse than your current situation?

I also think this is likely because you have reached the point where according to the university's rules you have to submit or it's an automatic fail, and your supervisors are trying to find a way to give you a last chance. They are probably suggesting you return home because of the visa situation. Read your university's regulations carefully of course, but this sounds like they are trying to give you a chance of being able to complete.

Yes 5-6 per day interpersed with conference invites - none of them are remotely in my field. Careful setting of spam filters can help.

Leave them completely alone. Seriously contacting them and asking them to be sympathetic is a really bad idea. In fact depending on your university's regulations, it might even infringe the examination rules.

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/may/01/academic-anonymous-leaving-academia
I thought this might be of interest - I think the comments are thought-provoking.

Timmy I think you are probably right and that you need a 1st or distinction at MA to get funding in such a competitive field, but would expect that a good proposal would secure a place at most universities. It's great that you have the money to self-fund, but just wanted to urge you to think what you want to get out of the PhD before you spend so much (not just in fees and maintenance but also lost earnings). It's just that doing a PhD often isn't fun - I enjoyed mine but several years of reading on here has persuaded me that I am a weird person - and the benefits other than personal achievement are not great. There are very few academic jobs out there, far too many PhDs chasing them, and the degree can be seen as over-qualification by other employers. I know several people who self-funded in my field, and who bitterly regret it, as they were naive about the reality of academia (definitely not a comfortable ivory tower these days) and getting jobs afterwards. You might be fully aware of how things are but as this forum makes obvious, many are not, and I thought it was at least worth flagging up as something to think about.