Did you do both of these?
yes I did both of those, I even tried w/o creating soft link also.
Some more details of my setup,
1) MySQL-client-5.5.14-1.rhel5.x86_64.rpm -
I have installed client and server both in the same system.
2) This version doesn't contain"/etc/my.cnf" file directly,
a) The location "/usr/share/doc/MySQL-server-5.5.14/" contians 4 files as small,medium,large and huge conf files.
I am copying "xxx-medium.cnf" file as "/etc/my.cnf"
3) The only change in "my.cnf" file, is
Prev -"socket = /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock"
Modified - "socket = /clariion/mysql-data/mysql.sock"
4) And the only change in "/etc/init.d/mysql" is
Prev - "datadir=/var/lib/mysql"
Modified - "datadir=/clariion/mysql-data"
I am following the link
http://kaliphonia.com/content/linux/how-to-move-mysql-datadir-to-another-drive
Actually i didn't find the "datadir" path in "my.cnf" file, so i did a search, and found it in "/etc/init.d/mysql".
Please let me know, If any more details required.