strange behaviour

Hi,

For the last few hours I have been unable to access the site I am running for a group. For the last few weeks the site has been very slow. Pages have been taking between 10s to over a minute to render.

Today I tried accessing the dashboard (/wp-admin/index.php) but I was being redirected to wp-admin/install.php. The message read @Insufficienct requirements’ telling me I needed mysql 5.0 or later to run 3.2.1. This is strange since I just created a mysql 5.0 database for the purpose of upgrading and did so successfully last week. The site had been running well albeit kind of slowly. No other web pages are available either.

In the last few minutes the homepage has become available but no other pages are visible or can be accessed.
Following that, the dashboard became available but not the home page and anything that loads is very slow to do so.

Right now no posts or pages can be seen but the homepage is viewable and I have very slow access to the Dashboard.

I am unable to reach the person who set the site up and registered the domain. According to whois it is registered with dotster. I checked the name servers used by dotster and they are different to the ones mentioned on the whois report.
Could this be the problem?

I’d really appreciate some help on this, I’m at my wits end.