Where I have an older 286 or 386 PC with a BIOS that is not able to auto detect the "parameters", I temporarily insert the adaptor and media (SD card or Compact Flash) into a later generation PC that does have a BIOS that is able to auto detect the "parameters". They normally list the CHS, LBA & "Normal" parameters. I then write these down and manually type them in in the CMOS setup of the older PC. Either use the CHS or "Normal" parameters, since it won't be able to translate using the LBA parameters.
Just take note that older BIOSes in 286 & 386 PC's are normally limited to 504 MiB or 528 MB (depending on how you calculate it). So, regardless of the size of your storage device (SD card), the BIOS will only be able to read up to this maximum limit. In such a case, you can just insert the following parameters: 1024 cylinders, 16 heads & 63 sectors (you can reduce the cylinders to 993, which is what my BIOS has picked up as the setting for my 512 MB Compact Flash card). Using the maximum cylinders of 1024, this should then give you a total capacity of 528,482,304 bytes = 504 MiB (or 528 MB).
However, this would be a waste of the available storage space. To overcome this you can either use Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO) software or, you can plug in a network card with a Boot ROM socket, flash an EEPROM chip with the XT-IDE BIOS and then let that BIOS "take over" the function of the main BIOS (in terms of hard drive parameters).
Just bear in mind that DOS (up to 7.0) is limited to a maximum partition size of 2 GB (you can create multiple partitions).