I ran into the same issue. I have created a hdfs folder '/home/username/hdfs' with sub-directories name, data, and tmp which were referenced in config xml files of hadoop/conf.
When I started hadoop and did jps, I couldn't find datanode so I tried to manually start datanode using bin/hadoop datanode. Then I realized from error message that it has permissions issue accessing the dfs.data.dir=/home/username/hdfs/data/ which was referenced in one of the hadoop config files. All I had to do was stop hadoop, delete the contents of /home/username/hdfs/tmp/* directory and then try this command - chmod -R 755 /home/username/hdfs/
and then start hadoop. I could find the datanode!