I have searched online for insructions, but all I can find is stuff on resizing reiser and ext2 partitions. I am not sure if I need to resize the LVM voume on hdb2 first, and then the filesystem, or if I do it the other way around. What commands do I run to do this?
If I understand your question correctly, you want to resize the actual LVM partition so that there is 25Gb marked as unused in your partition table. This is not possible. You can only return space to the LVM so that it is available to e2fsadm. And of course your problem now is that you don't have a root or boot partition available to install another Linux distro. Best is probably to install a VMware virtual machine with another distro on it.
Brian -- Brian Richardson Software Developer Public Key available at http://www.cubik.ca/
