I gave the details of my problem at reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/27qrun/more_specific_questions_about_failed_win_81mint/ tl;dr: I deleted the /, /home, and swap partitions I made for mint after realizing my installation couldn't be booted into and gave the space back to my windows partition. Running boot-repair on my mint live session messed stuff up. Now I can't even boot to my live session usb because grub is left over. Windows 8.1 does work though.