[Asus Zenfone Selfie Questions & Answers] Lobstercat:
Posted this as well over on the official Asus site, but I've always found XDA to be full of great answers (& awesome devs) so posting here as well. Okay, so my fault for being impatient to wait for the gradual OTAs but now here's the problem. I rooted the phone and unlocked the bootloader, then installed TWRP for recovery. I backed up my phone. Then I tried to install (flash) new ROMs, starting with some official ones from the ASUS website, then branching out to Lineage, CM, Ressurection, Dirty Unicorns, and uh, something else, don't remember. Anyway, nothing works. I cannot install from SD card, from phone, or from ADB sideload. Nor can I now restore my backup.

ALL ROMs give me errors, I took screenshots of some recent attempts all saying zip signature verification error, lots of other ones indicating the wrong ROM. I researched that error, don't remember exactly what it said, but the workarounds posted were to unzip the ROMs and edit a file, deleting the part that checks for the right version. I can understand if a third party ROM has this problem, but ALL the ROMs - even the ones downloaded directly from Asus?!? No, I think there is another problem here though I could be wrong. Trying to restore my backup gives me either MD5 failed to match or Extracktarfork() Error 255.

So now the system partition is wiped and so nothing will boot at all. The one silver lining is that I CAN still boot into TWRP recovery. Another issue which may or may not be related is that (Just before the system partition got wiped during another attempted ROM flash) I lost the ability to write anything to the external SD card. The contents were readable but I could not write anything to it at all. I would chalk all my ROM problems up to a screwy SD card except that ADB sideloading didn't work either so ... I don't know what to do here. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

If you need any additional info, just ask - I probably just forgot to put it in the post. Just in case, I am working with a Asus Zenfone Selfie, ZD551KL, Z00UD, Android WW, 32G internal, 3G RAM. Oh, one last thing, probably just a bum cord but sometimes especially now ADB in windows doesn't see anything & I have to use linux.

Was originally hoping to get the latest Android N installed - Lineage/CM, but at this point I would gladly just go back to the stock ROM if I could finally get it to work. Thank you all again for reading my question & for any help or suggestions you can offer.

EDIT: The more info the better the help, right? I removed the SD card- trying to retrieve my info from it. I can view, just not copy (or write) so using a data recovery program to copy my files off, then I will try to reformat it. Anyway, I tried sideloading and installing from both CM and official Asus zips so I could post the errors - & they have changed a bit. Sideloading remains the same: CM gets to around 50% then stops with the line "Total xfer: 1.00x". The Asus ROM never starts. It gives the error "cannot read ..." but checked it with 7zip and it says there are no errors. On the phone side, obviously nothing on the Asus ROM since it never even starts, but the CM says "assert failed: ....", then gives an ERROR: 7. Copying the files to internal storage & trying to flash them from there, Asus ROM says Zip signature verification failed. Then "Unable to mount storage". CM says assert failed, ERROR: 7, & Unable to mount storage. Hope that helps!

EDIT2: Also tried the suggestion of deleting the asserts part of the ROM, but it says "Invalid zip file format". Any ideas on what the proper zip file format would be? If you open up 7zip as a program there are some options there, what would I need to do differently?