Stupid bitlocker/hashcat question

[atom]

You can't crack recovery keys, forget about that. IMO this mode in Bitcracker is useless because the keyspace, even optimized, is simply too big to brute force, which is why we did not add it to hashcat. AND OTOH, if you know parts of the recovery key, then you typically know all parts of it.

So the real questions is, if it is not protected with a password/pin, then it's protected with a TPM? In that case you should be able to boot the machine? I don't get it.