You may have flashed your drive with the wrong firmware, as there are several version for your drive. What make of PC do you have? Did you buy the drive retail or OEM? (dont know what that means? search plz)
If you've flashed with the wrong firmware, chances are your drive is dead. You can try flashing back to the original, stock firmware, but that's only worth trying if you are sure you've flashed it with the wrong firmware. Answer my above questions and we can determine that.
I have a own built system with an OEM drive brought from an online store.
I have managed to flash to version 2.58 with the help of a piece of software called discinfo.
Now my drive will read some discs, but not all!
The ones it seem not to want to read are the original DVD film rental discs, just get a lot of clicking noises?
I haven't try burning anything yet, but now I wonder if it's a windows issue, as I did a Pioneer flash update for my Pioneer 120S DVD-ROM using the 1.01 update and everytime I pop a disc in, it freezes the system after a lot of clicking noises, it was doing this before the firmware update on this one as well by the way.
Though this Pioneer will read everything in Safe Mode?
The NEC won't read the Rental DVD's in Safe Mode though!
I did try rolling back the driver in Device Manager, but that didn't work.
Though I have managed to get the firmware back to version 2.58, which I beleive is the latest one for this drive from here - http://forum.rpc1.org/dl_all.php#N I now seem to be able to read most things again, I haven't tried burning as yet though, fingers crosssed!
I think this was a lucky escape for me, I don't think I'll mess around with firmware again!