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My internal hard disk just crashed and all the partitions are gone. I tried using TestDisk's Deep Search feature
but it's taking too long - it just hangs at 45% for more than a day. Scanning 1 cylinder takes more than 5 minutes.
Probably the disk is too damaged.

I understand that I should first clone this disk to another disk using ddrescue and then try running TestDisk on
that new disk to recover partitions, that way it would much faster.

The problem is that I have only 1 external disk. and it already has some data. I was thinking of creating a new partition
on my external disk and then clone my internal disk into that partition using ddrescue.

My question is, if I create a partition on my new disk and clone my old hard disk into that partition, will TestDisk
be able to recover old partitions from that new partition?
The scenario would be like partitions within a partition, I don't know if that works or not.

You can use ddrescue to create an image file and once it's done run testdisk on the image.dd file.
It will be better to using ddrescue to write to a partition.

Follow up question:
My hard disk had NTFS and Ext4 partitions.
So in which format should I create the new partition to hold the image?
Or that doesn't really matter?

It doesn't really matter but it must not be fat32 as no file bigger than 4 GB can be created on it.

I can't thank you enough for you help.