After cloning data shrunk 31GB WHY?

Cloned a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 250GB (5400 RPM) (original Lenovo T61 drive) to a Western Digital 500GB Scorpio Black (7200 RPM) using Acronis WD Version. Acronis made me ADD the disk first to partition and format it then it allowed cloning.

Used automatic settings. Took about 45 minutes with original disk in a USB drive new disk inside T61. Booted Acronis from DVD/CD drive. Log showed successful copying of service and Windows partition and resetting MBR on new disk.

Rebooted from new disk. Windows Vista rebooted and got normal desktop. Then got message searching for device driver for WD5000BEKT (the new disk). BIOS level is at 2.21 as I did not update the BIOS before cloning.
After about a minute got message that device driver for new disk was successfully installed. Had to reboot to take effect. Shutdown and rebooted successfully.
Went to each disk using Windows Explorer- Properties and checked block on new disk to index the disk to improve searching speed.
Original disk has 67+GB used and new disk shows 36+ GB used. DID NOT ASK TO COMPRESS THE DISK.

Why the 31 GB difference. Have not checked all operations or all programs but am using the T61 now on the Internet to submit this question.

If anything I expected more disk space utilization especially when asking for the indexing of the whole disk.

I'm mystified.

BIGHANK

NOPE recovery partion only a few hundred MB and is there.

One of the first things I did was to use Diskkeeper to view the regular and recovery partitions. Both are there. Acronis added a few MB to the original size but the recovery partition is there and very small.

BIGHANK