chilifries,

Did your source disk have one 60Gb partition holding Vista with the remaining 120Gb as unallocated free space?

If it wasn't then the cloned disk sdb would have a copied partition table, from sda, indicating the partition boundary at 160Gb. Since in the target hard disk sdb is physically 120Gb large that would cause all operating systems, including Vista, to refuse to handle it.

The re-activation may be to do with its standard booting check on the partition table has been enabled. I often switch it off if the entries in the partition table is going to be altered. Vista protects itself by checking with a backup copy of the system setting and that should be disabled if the OS is to be cloned to a different environment.

I didn't need to re-activate mine in the link indicated in Post #5 when changing it into a smaller disk.

Anyway glad to see it worked out for you.