My program has two possible starting pages, one if a users table exists, and one for when it doesn't. The reason for this is that if there is no user table then i need to enter the set up process to create the table and add the admin.

What is the correct procedure in hibernate to see if a table has been created yet?

Why don't you instead look for the admin row? ie, the users table exists all the time, just look for the admin row and depending on that decide what to do.