Computer question: My Compaq Presario 2500 laptop faults during boot-up ..

[Trajan]

It never makes it to the Windows start screen: it flashes an error flag (in blue screen, which I cannot read, of course), then attempts a restart, where it repeats the same process, over and over, ad infinitum ....

I believe the hard drive is full, and completely exhausted ... It had been bogging down pretty badly lately, and I had thought about dumping some stuff off before this happened ... but I procrastinated .... Now I cant get in ...

I believe I need to do this:

Create a CD boot disk (on another computer) with the bare minimum DOS, just to be able to get in and have access to the directories for erase activities. .. Remember most laptops have no floppy drives ... mine doesnt ...

Create a RAM drive and transfer the DOS to it for execution since I have no other available volatile mass storage (since my main drive is full ... ) ...

I would like to transfer my important family photo JPG's to a writable CD, but Im not sure I can execute CD-R operations from a DOS environment ... Short of actually dumping the family photos to CD-R, I could prbably get away with finding enough CRAP files to dump so I obtain enough overhead in mass storage to operate windows again, and THEN do what I should have done: save to CD all my important files, and clean up my damned overstuft computer ...

A few questions for the geeks:

1) Which DOS is usable for Windows XP-Pentium IV laptops these days ? ...

2) Is this a viable approach (see above) to execute a fix/repair ???

3) What are the commands for creating a RAM drive ? ... My puter has 512MB, certainly enough for performing DOS operations in RAM ....

4) Are there generic CD-R DOS drivers that can manage CD reord functions in a DOS environment ? ...

5) SURELY I am not the first laptop owner to exhaust their disk space: are there Off-The-Shelf solutions available in the marketplace to rezcue my poor abused laptop, and save the family heritage ? ..

ANY Nerd help here would be greatly appreciated .....

Thanks in advance ....

BTW? : Have I told my fellow DUers lately how much I love you ? ...

Not enough ...