cgsecurity.org

I accidentally wrote over the boot sector of a 2TB external hard drive with an ArchLinux boot image that was about 500MB large. Obviously, the entire file system is unrecognized and asks to be formatted. It was formatted for a windows computer. TestDisk's deep scan failed to recover the partition and I was suggested to use PhotoRec. The problem is how large the external hard drive is. I have numerous extra hard drives but none are 2TB or larger. Is it possible to use PhotoRec in chunks and write to multiple recovery drives?

Or, even better, is there a simpler way to possibly rewrite the boot sector

Photorec writes a file called photorec.ses to your home folder it seems. If you quit your session (and maybe works with "stop" as well but I'm not sure about that) on the drive you are recoverting from and restart it again photorec will check to see if the photorec.ses file exists and will ask you if you want to continue that recovery session. If you indicate yes photorec will prompt you for location to save the data. So you could manually check it every now and then and substitute a new drive to save the recovered files (or have crontab job automatically check and email you). Disclaimer: I'm no photorec expert