Reduction to Maximum Independent Set
Your problem, as stated, is already the independent set problem, as defined e.g. on Wikipedia.
A very similar NP-Complete problem is Clique, which is part of Karp's original 21 NP-complete problems, where, given a graph $G$ and an integer $k$, you try to find a complete subgraph of size $k$. It is easy to see that looking for an independent set in a graph is the same as looking for a clique in its complement graph.
In Karp's paper one can also find a straightforward reduction from SAT to Clique, and the reduction does not depend on whether the graph is connected or not. Hence it does not matter whether your graph is connected or disconnected.