Linux distrabution image

You can use Partimage (http://www.partimage.org/) to create and restore disk images and parted (http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/parted.html) if you need to edit the partition table.

The partimage web site has RPM packages (RedHat 8), but also ISO disk images for a bootable CDROM. The following link points to a FAQ document that gives you an overview, but also a brief introduction in how to use the application: http://www.digitalissues.co.uk/html/os/misc/partimage.html

Ok this software will back up and restore but I am wanting to creat a distrabuted image if I use this on a workstation and image the drive and its scsi and I image it to an ide drive on a diferwnt machine and defrent hardware , is this machine going to boot.

No, not without any changes to the content of the disk. I'm not aware of anything that will do this automatically for you. If you go from a SCSI disk to an IDE disk, then the disk device that needs to be mounted as root changes (e.g. from /dev/sga1 to /dev/hda1). In order to mount this correctly, you have to edit the /etc/fstab file. And there may be other files that need to be changed, the /etc/fstab file is just the most obvious one.

So this is not a fesable project to persue then.  How about an instalation like kikstart but from a master machine with all the software pached and working.  Because if I do indivedual in stalls and then have to fix all the software probles, such as Mozilla and all the plugins, for 4000 computers it is just not fesable for me to do that.  Do you have any other sugestions how to solve my problem.

For Red Hat try this:  http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7.3-Manual/custom-guide/ch-kickstart2.html

The kickstart configurator allows you to specify a pre-installation script and a post-installation script. This script can call other programs that could do a lot of the additional installs and patching (for things that cannot be installed as part of a standard Red Hat package selection).