USB device icon does not display on Gnome desktop and gnome-volume-manager does not start when logging in as root

Issue

• Hotplugging external usb hard drive fails for root user
• In the case of a standard user login, when I plug a USB hard drive, it gets automatically mounted and an icon appears on the desktop.  However for some reason if I am logged in as root this doesn't happen.
• When I log in as a normal user, the gnome-volume-manager is running, but when I log in as root user it is not running even though it is in the session startup list
  • I tried to run gnome-volume-manager manually and it failed to start.