You need to be certain whether the Windows loader is intact and readable by Linux or not in order to try Linux specific recovery. If you're certain that Linux Mint installation went fine and is working good, open the Terminal, and type
sudo os-prober, alternatively, you can press TAB key two times after writing os to see what is the actual command for os-prober on Mint.
It should return an output like this:
/dev/sda1:Windows 7 (loader):Windows:chain
It means that Linux detects your Windows loader, so let's proceed further. Since Mint uses Grub 2.0, fire up Terminal and type
It should print some configuration related output. Search your Windows entry after ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###. If the output shows such entry, type in Terminal
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
,or the location of your grub.cfg, depending upon the installation.- Now type
grub-install /dev/sda, where sda is the primary HDD for me.
Reboot your system normally, and select the Windows entry from Grub, it should boot.
If this doesn't work, then there must a problem with Windows loader, you need to recover it. Recovering Windows loader is trivial if Windows Installation Disk is provided. Boot into the installation Disk , proceed to the window where it shows Install, click the Repair option at the bottom of the same screen, wait for the Windows to do some searching, it will eventually show some output (irrelevant for now), click on Advanced Recovery, and find the Command Prompt from there. You can follow HTG guide here if you are uncertain where to go next. Open Command Prompt, and type
bootrec.exe /fixbootbootrec.exe /fixmbr
Reboot the System and you should directly be able to boot into Windows. But now you can't boot into Linux Mint. To enable GRUB again, download the SuperGrub 2 disk, burn it, boot into it and it will show you a Grub Menu with OS it can find. You can boot into Mint from there, and repeat the aforementioned Grub steps to restore it.
If all else fails, Windows must be freshly installed. But, I'm always able to recover it from aforementioned techniques.
About SuperGrub 2 Disk :
Super GRUB2 Disk helps you to boot into most any Operating System (OS) even if you cannot boot into it by normal means...it’s a boot disk that will try to find all of your Operatings Systems and build a boot menu so that you can choose the one you want to boot from. From inside your booted Gnu/Linux you will be able to restore Grub by using one straight-forward command.
Link to SuperGrub 2 Disk :
Here. Choose the Stable one.
Best Answer
os-prober(used byupdate-grub) requires the following kernel features to detect the Windows 8 boot loader.CONFIG_MD) ->CONFIG_BLK_DEV_DM)CONFIG_FUSE_FS)CONFIG_NTFS_FS)