1) When I put the VL2 ROMs on my VL1 card, the motherboard could no longer talk to the VL-1 or the VGA card. Keyboard lights still worked, but it's tough to do anything without video.
2) My VL-1 had the same BIOS as the image that we had, but had newer Controller Firmware "43205", aka V2.3. That firmware seemed willing to try to work with drives up to 8GB. I put the ROM images here: https://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=2252
3) Curiously, the ROMs are 27C256 roms and the sockets are labeled 27C256 on the cards, but the first half of the ROMS are blank when I read them from a tl866 and if I put the 16KB part of the images with data on 27c128 ROMs, the cards seem to work fine.
Edit: Maybe not all the address lines are hooked up and A14 is tied high?