*Concepts you may want to Google beforehand: memory offsets, pointers* Please open page 14 [of this document]( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~exr/lectures/opsys/10_11/lectures/os-dev.pdf)1 and look at the figure with the memory layout. The only goal of this lesson is to learn where the boot sector is stored I could just go ahead and tell you that the BIOS places it at `0x7C00`, but an example with wrong solutions will make things clearer. We want to print an X on screen. We will try 4 different strategies and see which ones work and why. First, we will define the X as data, with a label: ```nasm the_secret: db "X" ``` Then we will try to access `the_secret` in many different ways: 1. `mov al, the_secret` 2. `mov al, [the_secret]` 3. `mov al, the_secret + 0x7C00` 4. `mov al, 2d + 0x7C00`, where `2d` is the actual position of the 'X' byte in the binary Take a look at the code and read the comments. Compile and run the code. You should see a string similar to `1[2ยข3X4X`, where the bytes following 1 and 2 are just random garbage. If you add or remove instructions, remember to compute the new offset of the X by counting the bytes, and replace `0x2d` with the new one. Please don't continue onto the next file unless you have 100% understood the boot sector offset and memory addressing. Now, since offsetting `0x7c00` everywhere is very inconvenient, assemblers let us define a "global offset" for every memory location, with the `org` command: ```nasm [org 0x7c00] ``` Go ahead and open `boot_sect_memory_org.asm` and you will see the canonical way to print data with the boot sector, which is now attempt 2. Compile the code and run it, and you will see how the `org` command affects each previous solution. Read the comments for a full explanation of the changes with and without `org` ----- [1] This whole tutorial is heavily inspired on that document. Please read the root-level README for more information on that.