I found a good solution for me which I want to share with you. Of course, I cannot take any responsibility if you follow my instructions. Use at your own risk, you are yourself fully responsible for your phone.
I came from 1.6 with old partition layout and have installed 1.8.5 Storage Updater without first installing 1.8.5. Here I stuck with old Recovery console which then could not find any content for /sdcard and with non-working GApps (first to mention Google Play, but all other Google services are practically affected due to this).
I usually work on Linux, so I wanted to find something without requiring Windows. All I needed was USB cable which connected my Fairphone to my Computer, and ADB, which you can find as part of the Android SDK available from Google working on any both Windows and Linux. On Linux, there are preconfigured Packages available for e.g. Debian from its repository.
Fairphone has integrated the 1.8.5 Recovery console in the new Storage_Upgrader_1.8.5 in the main directory as image file recovery.img. This makes it very simple to install:
- Download & Unzip FP1-Fairphone_OS_v1_8_5_Partition_upgrade_2015-05-12.zip to your harddrive
- Copy the recovery to the device: adb push recovery.img /sdcard/
- Run Shell into device: adb shell (if it doesn’t find your device you turn on “USB-Debugging” in Settings->Developer options)
- Become root inside adb: su
- Go to location of your image file: cd /storage/sdcard0/
- Flash recovery image: dd if=recovery.img of=/dev/recovery
- Exit adb shell: exit
Now you have a working recovery console which detects your sdcard and can install contents from it. I continued via adb, which is also working nicely. Since GApps need to work out I have now continued installing 1.8.5 for unified storage. This file contains patches for making GApps work again (same as the new Storage Upgrader, but I cannot run the whole Upgrader package any more, and I was unsure how to run the patch):
- Download FP1-Fairphone_OS_v1_8_5_OTA_2015-05-07.zip for FP1U - Mid-2014 (2nd batch) & FP1 with unified storage
- Reboot into Recovery (Power button + Volume up), press power button to enter menu, select “apply update from adb”
- Flash new Fairphone OS via adb: adb sideload FP1-Fairphone_OS_v1_8_5_OTA_2015-05-07.zip
- After copying the OS to the device the recovery console will automagically start installing it. The progress bar will take a while to proceed from around 30% till 70%.
- I have unzipped the USB cable when flashing was finished. The recovery showed its main menu and I chose: “reboot system now”
My Apps which I have installed from F-Droid in the meanwhile remained existing and working, now I could proceed with installing GApps with the installer provided by Fairphone.