Some of those controllers are only designed to operate with certain drive types. Some of those later model WDs are probably your best shot. You're not going to get very far without running debug though. Usually the low level format utility is accessed by typing g=c800:5, but it depends on what address you have the card set to. That initiates the built in software utility in the card BIOS. The user friendliness varies from card to card, but you usually need to know important details about the drive to proceed, like how many cylinders, how many heads, interleave etc. Sometimes that is printed on the drive label.

Not sure how well 8-bit MFM/RLL controllers work in 16-bit motherboards boards.

Well so far I was able to get the WDXT-Gen2-Plus to read all the hard drives I can actually perform a LLF using g=c800:5, I was using that card on a 486 motherboard it has Super Bios II Rev 1.0 and it seems pretty easy to use it asks me what interleave I want to set the drive to and then asks me if I want to format bad sectors and if I want to dynamically set the drive. I skipped on formatting the bad sectors and dynamic settings. It seems to work but I don't know for sure if I am doing it correctly. I did notice the sound of the ST-251 has changed when it boots up since I formatted it I'm not sure what that meas I did? The card only seems to go up to 20mb so I can't go full size on the ST-251 or ST-4038 for example. For some reason I can not get the IBM big controller card to read the ST-412 which is the drive that came with the 5160 and that card. I don't get the 1701 error but it won't let fdisk. Any recommendations on what else I should do and what version DOS disk should I get that will work wit the Tandon drive to do debug with?

If I recall, with the interleave properly set a 20mb formatted 251 was back then considered a very bulletproof (and expensive) configuration.
I am assuming when you are in the BIOS you can manually select one of a number of drive types and not trying to format everything wile set on a 20mb drive preset. The 251 is six heads and 820 cylinders. A 225 is four heads and 615 cylinders.

I am pretty sure the MFM controller you want for larger drives is the WD 1002A-WX1. I ran that drive with dual ST 251s formatted to 40MB. I think it could handle larger ones though. The A in the model name is important. The 1002-WX1 only does 20MB. What's the 1004A-WX1 all about? The model name sounds promising.