Mint dual-boot install doesn't have boot option at start up
 

I installed Mint 11 on my xp laptop and selected the dual boot option. The install seemed to go very well on the 300 gb hard drive. The drive was partitioned nearly equally with a slightly larger portion given to windows. When I was given the notice to restart the machine, I did so and the computer launched directly to windows. I thought that I must have missed the os boot option while looking at something else. I re-booted the computer but have the same situation. The new partition shows in "my computer" but, of course windows cannot read it. Is there a way to remedy this?

I have no experience with Mint, but I suspect that the following error occured. During installation, you were given the option of installing grub to the MBR (master boot record) of the hard drive, or to the boot sector of the Mint partition. If the default was to install to the boot sector of the partiton, or if you selected that option, that would explain your problem.

Insert the Mint install disk and power up. Does the Mint install disk offer the option to boot from hard drive? If so, select that option. Once in Mint, you can run grup-install (hd0) to install grub to the MBR (do some research to verify the command I just gave you).

Note that you may have to manually edit the grub2 configuration files to add windows to the boot menu.

Or, you could re-install Mint. When the installation reaches the grub install, be careful to select installing grub to the MBR.

I haven't used Mint 11 but, in Mint 10 the Allocate Drive Space window had an option with a drop-down box at the bottom "Device for Boot Loader Installation" which is where you would select the drive. Booting straight into windows after the installation would lead me to agree with bigrigdriver about what happened. I've always used manual partitioning so I'm not sure what options you get with the "dual boot option". The link below gives an explanation of reinstalling Grub2 on Ubuntu but Mint uses Grub2 also so the methods should work. Check Section 12.2:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2