installing Mac OS 10.2 on new Maxtor

Help!!!! I added a new Maxtor 120 G hard drive to my G3 Blue and white Mac , set it as slave, installed OS 10.2 , it crashed after a few weeks and now I can't get it to install again. It starts to install and then crashes and tells me unexpected error code 8 and restart the commuter. Any ideas? Do I have a bad hard drive? I've run disk repair several times, sometimes it says minor error on mount check fixes it successfully, it says but it still finds same problem when I verify it.