I'm new to Linux, so I might have many questions in the coming weeks.

My first question is I recently intalled RedHat 9.0. It gives me the option of LILO or Grub as my boot loader. Here's what happened:

4gb HDD
Used LILO (Chose boot from boot sector, rather than partition)
Did not boot.. Just a blank screen.

Used Grub (Boot from sector)
Booted fine.

To understand this, I was wondering if someone could explain to me why LILO did not work.

There are many reasons why LILO could not have worked. Misconfiguration could be one reason ; an imcompatibility could be another.

Also Rick you confuse me a litte with this boot from sector or boot from partition. In fact its install to boot sector or install to master boot record. if you had no code in your MBR, of course your machine would not boot.

99 times out of 100, a bootloader not working is due to misconfiguration. There are only very rare instances with LILO that would not allow it to boot. Older versions had problems booting to partitions that started above the 1024 block mark(Think old DOS booting).

However, I don't think you'd really want to use LILO anyways. GRUB is more accepted, and if you ever switch to other distros you will find that more circles use GRUB then anything. I personally use GRUB and SBM to boot my machines.

its worth with lilo trying the lba32 option as this sorts a lot of problems.

LBA32 was not enable, so I might give that a whirl.

I feel like there was very little room for error on the part of misconfiguration since Redhat makes the install so easy. But chances are, it is my fault. Just trying to see what I did wrong. I guess it is a pretty vague question though.