The PC has ubuntu 12.04 LTS and WinXP installed. It is physically inaccessible. It is usually booted by WOL (wake-up over LAN). As it is, the preferred GRUB default is to boot XP. Question: Is there a way to initiate a Windows reboot, shut down Windows but then boot ubuntu instead? e.g. leave "something" somewhere for grub to see and boot ubuntu rather than the "hard-coded" default.

You could mount the boot partition ( with something like http://www.ext2fsd.com/ )
Edit the grub.cfg altering the default ( i'd use gvim for windows).
Umount /boot

You could then reboot and the new grub.cfg should 'kick in'


an alternative is to run xp in a vm on linux host

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You could if you knew which menuentry Ubuntu was in its grub.cfg file. In all likelihood, it is the first. You would also need to know which entry xp is. You would also need a timeout set for Grub, the standard is usually 10 seconds. Then you could arrow up to the Ubuntu entry, hit the Enter key and have grub boot Ubuntu. If there is no timeout, this obviously won't work and you will have to get into something more complex.

I'm not sure why you would have the bootloader of one system default boot to another system which is incapable in a default installation of writing to the other system, or even reading or recognizing it. I've not used WOL but, from your post I expect you don't see any menu?

The suggestion above of editing the grub.cfg file should work but if you don't make the same edit in /etc/default/grub, it will be gone after a grub update. I guess that won't be a problem though if you can't boot it?

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kinda strange to me in my experience grub/grub2 in dual boot scenarios has always defaulted to Ubuntu.

The Grub default boot entry will be the one from the system to which it is attached, in this case Ubuntu. The OP or someone obviously changed it although given the setup, I can't imagine why. Apparently not much thought was given to this.