Installing Windows Insider beta Windows 11 ARM on a Macbook Pro M1 with UTM/QEMU

I downloaded the Windows Insider beta of Windows 11 for ARM, and took a look at what’s involved to get it installed and up and running under UTM?QEMU on a Macbook Pro with an M1 CPU (ARM).

First, since the download is a .vhdx disk, I used the import option in the UTM frontend to import from the downloaded file. I also checked the option for the Spice drivers:

After starting to boot, the installer requires a network connection and it appears to get stuck:

Articles such as this one recommend to press Shift-F10 to get to a command prompt, and then enter this command to continue with the install skipping the requirement for a network connection: oobe\bypassnro

At this point the installer reboots and restarts, and this time you get an additional option on this dialog allowing you to skip the network requirement during installation:

After a short setup of a couple of minutes, Windows 11 desktop!

Next, the resolution seems to be fixed at 800×600, so knowing I checked the box in UTM for the Sprice/virtio drivers, I noticed there was a CDROM iso mounted on drive D:

Running the installer, it started up, and keeping all the defaults for now, installed without any issue:

All in all, pretty easy, only about 20 mins setup and it seems pretty snappy so far!

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