PSU fan connector issues

I'm trying to figure out the exact name of this part so I can actually buy one and get it hooked up properly. I picked up a case fan, but I ended up jamming the wires into the old connector by mistake. It’s just two wires—red and black—and there are only two slots available on the plug. The thing is roughly 8-9mm wide, maybe 3-4mm deep, and about 1cm tall.

Just cut the old stuff off and solder it back on, or maybe just twist the wires together and wrap them in some electrical tape. Just watch out so you don't leave too much slack hanging around, otherwise it might get caught in the fan, I guess. That's pretty much it...

Or you could just desolder the connector from the power supply PCB entirely and solder it directly.

So now I’m dealing with a different issue. I’m not entirely sure why, because I haven't even disconnected the power supply from the motherboard. This popped up:
https://ibb.co/JdSXbML
When I hit the reset button on the case, I either get this error or just a black screen with some boot message—and I can see the drive light isn't blinking. Interestingly, the BIOS still recognizes the drive.

That black error screen showed up right after I hooked up a new fan. At that point, I shut everything down, unplugged the SSD, plugged it back in, and everything seemed fine. I booted the PC maybe four or five times without any trouble, but then this morning, things went south again.

Go ahead and run those SSD/HDD diagnostics from the BIOS—but since you DIDN'T UNPLUG THE POWER SUPPLY FROM THE MOTHERBOARD, let me tell you: that is absolutely not how this works. Honestly, you should consider yourself lucky if you haven't fried something already. Regardless of the fact that you unplugged the main power cable, leaving that 24-pin connector attached to the board is asking for trouble; there’s enough static electricity floating around to fry a component in an instant.

Don't give me that. I was in Windows 3.1 a few times and everything seemed fine, so maybe the SSD isn't fried just yet.
The drives are showing up in the BIOS, though. I suppose I'll have to figure out how to actually test them.

Update 😁
I spent some time poking around the BIOS settings just to see what was there. I didn't find anything particularly useful; I was mostly looking for a reset option, thinking maybe things had just gotten a bit scrambled and a fresh start might help the system recognize all the components properly. The SSD shows up fine under the boot options within the BIOS itself. But when I try to actually boot, it fails—the machine shuts down, and when I try again, the SSD doesn't even show up in the boot menu, just the DVD drive and the HDD. So, I shut everything down and swapped the SATA cables between the SSD and the DVD drive. When I powered back up, the light came on and the SSD was detected. It kicked straight into the Windows installation screen, so I selected "Repair." It went into System Restore, spent some time fetching the restore point, and then restarted. After that, it actually worked. I did one more reboot just to be sure, and Windows loaded perfectly. Is there any other type of repair available besides a full Windows reinstall? I'd love to know if there's a way to fix this without wiping everything, just in case the SSD decides to disappear again.

It’s funny you mention that—it actually reminds me of an ordeal I had once, quite a long time ago, back when I was running Windows XP. I remember getting this dreaded error message right at bootup, claiming some critical system file was missing—if my memory serves me correctly, it was that specific ntoskrnl.exe file. It just refused to boot into Windows entirely. I managed to sort it out, though, by launching what I believe was called the recovery console—or maybe that wasn't the exact name, I can't quite recall, but it looked identical to a standard command prompt—and using those familiar command-line instructions to manually copy the missing ntoskrnl.exe from the Windows installation CD directly into the System32 folder on my Hard Drive. Once that was done, Windows booted up just fine...