I have never had this problem in the past. I installed Windows on my computer, and then I decided that I wanted to dual boot a Linux distro. My default was Mint, so I tried that. It installed with no problems onto the partition that I had previously made for it in windows (though I had Mint format it as Ext4). But when it rebooted, it went straight to Windows. There was no option for Mint. Thinking that there was some sort of problem with my installation of Mint, I tried Kubuntu as well. I told it to format the partition itself (again to Ext4) and everything went smoothly. Again, there was no way for me to choose which OS I wanted at start up. Now I am lost. I have never had this problem in the past. I have dual booted several other computers, and it has never been an issue. Does anyone have any idea what the problem could be? I would really like to have this machine be dual booted.
Did you install GRUB?
Is the Windows bootloader locked on an UEFI system?
Did you do an install of Windows or an install repair of Windows after installing Mint? (because that will overwrite the MBR)
What happens when a PC boots up, is that the BIOS starts up the interfaces, and looks for the tiny bootup "payload" on small part of the storage device that is flagged as boot (this part is like only a couple of hundred bytes big), that payload is executed, and shows the way to GRUB, GRUB loads the grub conf file, which has the list of the operating systems and the location of their respective bootloaders. You can try to update GRUB to see if it finds your Mint install.
I don't think you can boot to Linux from Windows boot loader. But, what you can do is boot windows from GRUB.
I can't provide support if you have a UEFI system since I've never touched that technology. But, if you have a BIOS system, then it's as simple as installing GRUB, installing a tar called os-prober, and then do the command: sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg Thus, in terminal, it would look something like this if using ArchLinux. I don't have experience with other distros, so you will have to determine the command counter-parts.
# sudo pacman -S grub
# sudo grub-install --target=1386-pc --recheck /dev/sda
# sudo pacman -S os-prober
# sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
If you can't find os-prober, I believe there is a manual way to config GRUB. I think you can find the info you need here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Grub#With_Windows .
The sequence it happens is: efi -> BIOS stored payload -> Grub -> OS bootloaders.
You can't boot to windows from a linux bootloader either, grub loads the bootloader of the OS you want to use.
FYI, the OP had already stated that he had installed Mint and Grub.
Since I do not know Mint, I gave him the Arch commands. The GRUB archwiki page has information that is likely pertinent to his case. The only difference are the commands (Like pacman/apt-get). Thus, he can easily extrapolate the commands for his distro.
Also, my apologies, you're likely right. But you can still chose a different OS from GRUB. Which, in OP's case, is relevant.
I don't really need to use any Linux distro for any reason. Windows works perfectly fine for me, especially since I game a lot and most of the games I play aren't on Linux (yet). Maybe when gaming on Linux becomes more feasable, I will put more time and energy into getting a Linux distro working for me. I only installed it in the first place because my past experiences were sp straight forward with the installation and everything else. I think that the problem might be that this is the first time that I've tried to install Linux on a system with a UEFI. I think that I am just going to give the partition space back to the Windows partition and just not worry about it. Maybe, I could get a separate hdd for a Linux install later on when gaming on Linux becomes better, but for now, I think that I'm just not going to bother with it.