I guess you could use it though I heared that some hard drives never worked on any other controller card than the one they came with, though I only have one MFM hdd and I never tested it with another controller card. However I also often heared that if you want them to work with each other, you need to low level format the HDD. That's were debug command you remember comes in : these cards had a rom chip that had a little program that you could execute from MS-DOS with the debug command to low level format the HDD. Then, if you're lucky, you should be able to access it from DOS and then it will be the regular stuff : FDISK.exe then "format c:" and the hdd will work.
One thing to note is that if your drive doesn't work at all or acts oddly, there might be a chance that the platters are stuck because the grease in the bearings became old.
The hard drive of my 8088 (my only MFM hdd ...) made the computer unable to start (the PSU refused to start up when the HDD was plugged in) because the tantalum caps were shorting out. Once replaced, it came to life, did something that could be considered as a seek test and then ... stopped. I restarted many times and once it came magically to life ! ... but once shut down, again when I tried to use it, it was doing the seek test and re-stopped ... after a while it came back to life again. At this point I thought "I heared that running them for a while was spreading again the grease in the bearings, made the metal of the platters to expand which would make it to be read better, etc ... So yeah, fuck it, I'm going to make it run for hours". After a trial of 1H, I tried it again for many more hours and what was my surprise when I restarted the HDD ... to see it doing it's stuff and keeping itself on. Even the sound it was making changed after that long time where it was spinning for nothing 🤣
One last important thing to test if you manage to format it is to check it for bad sectors. Apparently mine came out from the factory without any (just like yours, it's written on the label), but after checking it with scandisk, there was actually one bad sector. It's the only one so it's not bothering me. However if you're lucky enough, the bad sectors may not be permanent : one some newer HDDs I've got, after multiple low level format, some of the bad sectors disappeared completely, I've had the same thing with some floppy disks. So it should be worth it (though they might come back too ...)
