Okay an update.....
I now have a system in which my dual boot LM/Win7 can hibernate either way or BOTH! and boot up either way...hurrah!
My problem was the MS boot manager was in the MBR and lonely old GRUB was cast out to the boot partition. MS boot manager controlled the booting process in so far as if it knew MS had previously hibernated it would ignore all other OSs installed and go straight back into Windows.
I started off using Boot Repair usually distributed with Ubuntu and actually ended up creating a Live Mint 14 USB to which I added Boot Repair. I had great hopes and installed GRUB using Boot Repair to the MBR from the Live USB. Now after a certain sequence of events which I'm not blaming on Boot Repair but more to my poor memory
i.e. not sure what I did but all I know was I had got to a point where nothing was booting Windows or LM13 and I was getting error ....
File: \Boot\BCD
Status: 0xc000000f
Info: An error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data.
PANIC
At this point my priority became rescuing MSWin7 since this is where I had most to lose. I tried Boot Repair many times, Win7 recovery tools, all manner of MS console commands until I came across this little gem...
1. Start from recovery disc
2. Go to command line
3. Execute "bcdboot c:\windows /s c:"
4. Boot manager should be fixed now
(gratitude to this link
Windows 7 Boot\BCD file is corrupt)
YES!
crazily
Now I had my Win7 installation back booting fine with no data loss I decided to install and move up to Linux Mint 14 since I now had it on a Live USB, to hell with it I thought, so I deleted all existing linux partitions from within Win7. Rebooted from the LM14 live usb resized the Win7 partiton sda1 (increased), moved the contents of the ntfs partition sda3 to sda2 and deleted sda3 so MSWin7 was now in the first two partitions. (I guess I just like to be organised)
I then set about installing LM14 but during the installation process it would not recognise my MSWin7 installation no matter what I did, ARRGHHHH!!
So I manually created the necessary partitions (no need for boot) and installed LM14 to them making sure this time I installed GRUB to the sda1 partition. I then prayed, rebooted and to my relief GRUB came up offering me a choice of installed OSs, allowing me to hiberate to my hearts content.
I have set up a separate NTFS data partition which at some point will probably be shared between LM and W7. But for now simply having the convenience of being able to save the OS's state for the next boot is a blessing.
Sorry if this reads like a garbled mess from a novice (...and lets face it, it is) if it helps just one person it will have been worth it.