laptop shutdown

Im very new to linux, i have redhat 9 on a advent 900mhz 128mb laptop
i installed a clean new os, and it powers down the harddrive about every 30 seconds this is driving me to drink, is a power management problem?
or is it the bios
please please help me anyone,

it could be both, do a default settings in your bios and try again. if this doesn't work, try adding acpi=on to your kernel parameters in /boot/grub/grub.conf

and if this doesn't work, i'm afraid i can't think of anything else :(