Can I virtually restore a PC?

Here's my dilemma: I want to recover some photos on my girl's now dead laptop (she spilled coffee in it, typical girl hehe). I have a backup. The laptop was a x63 Windows 10 system with an AMD chip that was 'soldered on', the modern trend where nothing is fixable, and the PC repair guy said it's not worth repairing (he actually got it to work before it completely died, but it had problems ever since the coffee spill that never went away, like some sort of residue was literally gumming up the mobo, possibly spraying some solvent on it would have helped, but I digress). I got a system with lots of RAM, also x64 Win 10, and I run Oracle VirtualBox. So is it possible to somehow virtually restore this dead laptop on VirtualBox? I could of course do a physical restore on my new laptop, get the photos, then restore back to my image file. Just wondering if there's another way. I hate restoring hard drives from image files since I always fear something bad will happen, though so far in the half dozen times I've done it nothing has.

RL