ok... narrowed the problem down
 

I'm working on setting up mysql server using version 3.23 and it works for the default directory of the data... however it will not startup if I change the directory even if I change the owner & permissions to the exact same as default
owner & group are mysql & permissions are rwxr-xrwx for the new data directory.
the /etc/my.cnf config file was setting:
[mysqld]
datadir = /abc2/db

but every time the server is started it stops. I've checked the error log that appears in the directory I created.
--------------------------------------------------

030630 15:35:05 mysqld started
Cannot initialize InnoDB as 'innodb_data_file_path' is not set.
If you do not want to use transactional InnoDB tables, add a line
skip-innodb
to the [mysqld] section of init parameters in your my.cnf
or my.ini. If you want to use InnoDB tables, add to the [mysqld]
section, for example,
innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10M:autoextend
But to get good performance you should adjust for your hardware
the InnoDB startup options listed in section 2 at
http://www.innodb.com/ibman.html
030630 15:35:05 /usr/libexec/mysqld: Can't find file: './mysql/host.frm' (errno: 13)
030630 15:35:05 mysqld ended

---------------------------------------
I thought for a while maybe it was a problem because it wanted to default to InnoDB tables so I set the datapath in that section of settings to also point to the same location and I still got the same problem.

If anyone knows why this is happening please, let me know or let me know if there's a really good mysql forum I should post to.

Thanks

try this:
http://forums.devshed.com/f4/s.html