Certainly, you can restore any image of an OS inside a virtual machine (you must create the blank VM first), as long as you have bootable media which can recognize and restore the image type. Note that once the image has been restored inside the VM to the virtual hard disk, you will likely need to reconfigure the image before you can successfully boot it - as the image will have drivers, etc., for hardware from the physical PC which will not exist in the virtual one.
