I have a slackware Linux box in the closet (no monitor attached) that I telnet into when its on. Sometimes when I boot up, it has a filesystem error and sits at the "enter root password for maintenance" prompt, instead of going into multiuser mode.

Is there a way to have it automatically run "e2fsck -y" automatically when this happens so that I don't have to plug up a monitor to troubleshoot it?

You can always edit your /etc/rc.d scripts and add it to check at startup but you shouldn't get that error at boot time anyways unless your shutting the machine down improperly.
Also if your on a open network, might want to consider ssh, its more secure than telnet.

See man e2fsck. It looks like the -y switch might be useful to you.
E2fs are usually set to do fsck after a given number of reboots. If you can find where this is set you may be able to add the option. I can't remember just now where it is.

Well, my problem has just become far worse :-(

My original question was to avoid the inconvenience of having to plug up a monitor to get it to boot. But NOW when it boots, it runs fsck with errors, then lets me go into single user mode. I grep'ed to find that etc/rc.d/rc.S contains the script that calls fsck, however I wasn't able to save any changes because the filesystem was readonly.

Everytime this happened before it seemed to be fixed by e2fsck enabling me to boot,, but now it constantly loops: reboot, fail fsck, manually go into single user mode and run e2fsck, ^d to reboot, repeats the whole thing. If I don't go into single-user mode, it reboots automatically. Nothing I do in single user mode is enough to not require reboot (I see in the rc.d/S script that fsck return value of > 2 or 4 requires reboot).

How am I supposed to fix anything with a readonly filesystem? Was this due to the fact that I did a shutdown -F the last time it was running in multiuser mode? It was working completely fine before today.

Here are some of the error msgs during fsck: "drive ready seek complete error" and "uncorrectable error" and "force rewrite: yes" and finally "UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY: run fsck manually without -a and -p options"

BTW this is slackware 9 (2.4.20 kernel)

Help!!!

Maybe I'm completely off track here (sorry, it's late), but can't you remount the fs read-write?

you need to boot with the install cdrom in rescue mode
and run e2fsck on the system from there.