I set up and configured a multi-node Hadoop cluster using this tutorial.
When I type in the start-all.sh command, it shows all the processes initializing properly as
I configured hadoop.tmp.dir in conf/core-site.xml
I configured dfs.data.dir in conf/hdfs-site.xml
I configured dfs.name.dir in conf/hdfs-site.xml
Deleted everything under "/tmp/hadoop-/" directory
Changed file permissions from 777 to 755 for directory listed under dfs.data.dir
And the data node started working.