Need help on how to run W11 as a Virtual Machine on W10

As a complete newb to VM on PCs I need all the help I can get.
I have a Gigabyte B560 HD3 (U3E1) (with Intel Virtualisation Technology enabled) running Windows 10 Pro 22H2 Build 19045.315 and Windows 11 Pro 21H2 Build 22000.493 in dual boot mode.
I have EaseUS ToDo Backup 15.1 and with what I had read I thought it would be easy to set up a W11 VM using the P2V Recovery facility of the backup application to create a virtual disk file from my W11 image.
Turns out that it's not that simple, or that I've missed something.
I've tried VMWare Workstation Player and Oracle VirtualBox but neither works. I get BSODs or it just hangs.

Any advice or info would be very gratefully received.

Restoring a system image to a different HW profile (regardless of your choice in VM) is generally unsupported. Windows has a notion of the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) when it installs itself, mapping out the HW drivers it needs. When you don't prep a system beforehand with the expected drivers, then it crashes from a lack of driver support.

The bottom line is you can only backup & restore images to the same physical PC (or a different PC with identical HW), but the VM provides a different "HW profile". Restoring to a different PC will crash Windows just the same as your VM is doing.

Just do a clean install to the VM.

garlin said:

Restoring a system image to a different HW profile (regardless of your choice in VM) is generally unsupported. Windows has a notion of the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) when it installs itself, mapping out the HW drivers it needs. When you don't prep a system beforehand with the expected drivers, then it crashes from a lack of driver support.

The bottom line is you can only backup & restore images to the same physical PC (or a different PC with identical HW), but the VM provides a different "HW profile". Restoring to a different PC will crash Windows just the same as your VM is doing.

Just do a clean install to the VM.

That is generally not true. Windows 10/11 are very adept at adapting to new hardware. You statement was true for Windows 7, but not generally true for 10/11.

NavyLCDR said:

That is generally not true. Windows 10/11 are very adept at adapting to new hardware. You statement was true for Windows 7, but not generally true for 10/11.

cereberus said:

As you have pro, it is really gar better to use Hyper-V as it uses native Windows .vhdx files, and it is easy to mount those as drives and restore an image of OS to it.

Here are the key steps. Of course, you will need to have some experience in image backups and restores.

1) Make an image backup of your pc, preferably to a second hard drive. You need to include efi partition, and windows 11 partition. Rest are optional.

2) create a virtual hard drive (.vhdx file) big enough to hold efi partition and Windows 11 partition plus say extra 50 GB, again preferably on a second hard drive to windows drives.

3) boot into Windows 10 and create a Hyper-V virtual machine and attach vhdx file to it.

4) Run vm from Hyper-V.

There are good tutorials on how to use Hyper-V in tenforums tutorials.

cereberus said:

Totally agree. I just clone OS to a .vhdx file (including efi partition) and mount drive in Hyper-V vm.

So much easier than other VM tools as Hyper-V uses windows native vhdx files. Windows 10/11 contain all the key drivers needed to run in a Hyper-V vm. It just works virtually (no pun intended) every time.

Thanks guys.
I was using VMWare because it was touted as the way to go.
Will give Hyper-V a try.
BTW, I did manage to get W11 install running on VMWare workstation but it was dismally slow.