Is there a way to upgrade NOOBS preloaded in SD Card using Raspberry Pi 3B without flashing SD Card?

Flash the SD card by deploying the latest NOOBS version. That should solve all your problems.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/noobs/

Why use NOOBs. Flash with the latest version of the Raspbian Stretch https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/

Thank you for your suggestions tonygo and  fvan I had kept flashing SD Card as the final option. My question is why is an update failing at the below command and particularly at 67% when trying to download a package of size 278MB? Is it my network connection? No I guess because it is working. I’ll try again today.

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Do we have options which would work without flashing SD Card?

Is there a reason for not flashing? This would be the cleanest, fastest and easiest solution.

The update just downloads packages. If it stalls, it's probably due to a networking issue.

As for the dist-upgrade command, there are sometimes confirmations required. This can be automated using the "-y" option.
Try the following command: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y

If you are having trouble I would copy my files onto a thumb drive before they get lost.

How much room is left on the SD card? The other OSs take up quite a bit of room.

RasPi foundation usually recommend a fresh start rather than a dist-upgrade if you want everything to work properly.

I normally get a new, bigger card for a dist-upgrade and keep the old one separate as backup until everything is working.

Hope you get it working.

Update:

tonygo and fvan

Apologies I could not find to do your suggestions due to work and projects. Last week, I downloaded and burned a new 16GB SD Card with Raspbian Stretch Desktop OS found in the link you have provided https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/

But still there is nothing booting up. Now I get a blank screen and nothing else. But this works in older 3B board as a charm.

Thanks for your suggestions and help!

I looked at your original post and it looks like you got stuck just trying to update your version of Raspbian.  Are you sure you were truly stalled?  I've had issues running dist-upgrade where the get process takes a long time (many minutes) to acquire a package update from a repository.  Probably issues in the network path.

Anyway, since you tried flashing a new image which works on a 3B but not a 3B+, I would think that you either have a bad board or bad power supply.  I would guess that you used the same power supply for both boards, so you probably just have a bad 3B+ board.  Have you tried measuring the power supply current into the 3B+?  It will be somewhat higher than the 3B -> 400-500mA at idle.

I just received a new 3B+ from Element14 and I flashed the latest Raspbian desktop image (2018-10-09) on a 16GB SD card.  It booted up with no problem.

If the card boots with an older RasPi like a 3, the put it back in there and try running the dist upgrade.

Ex:

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get upgrade
   sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
   sudo rpi-update

You may need to install rpi-update if is not installed.

sudo apt-get install rpi-update

If this does not work, what did you use to load the Raspbian image on the SD card?  I have been using Etcher which works quite nicely.  It worked with my 3B+.

https://www.balena.io/etcher/

Thank you jomoenginer for the suggestion, I’ll give it a try.

I also used Etcher to format SD card with the OS image.

Thank you ralphjy for the suggestions. Yes, the update stalled after 67% and I waited like an hour before I jumped into this decision. And I tried it twice.

Yes I also presume it to be a bad board. The power supply seems to be ok (in the case that I used the same for 3B) but will try to get a new adapter and check. I am going to get an adapter with current output equal to or greater than 2A. Which one do you use? Some say 0.7A works, which is the one I have now.

Power Supply discussion link - https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=83275 where I looked for suggestions.