Ya, I ran for a long time with a passphrase in a system without a TPM. I recently got a TPM for it so I could have it restart without me being present.
I used the `manage-bde` command rather than powershell:
The GUI for bitlocker doesn't provide access to all the functionality that manage-bde provides (iirc: if a TPM is present, the passphrase options aren't presented in the GUI. And it used to talk about a "PIN" instead of a passphrase/password, but the "PIN" can (with some gpo tweaking) contain letters/space/punct as well as numbers.
I used the `manage-bde` command rather than powershell:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/informatio...
The GUI for bitlocker doesn't provide access to all the functionality that manage-bde provides (iirc: if a TPM is present, the passphrase options aren't presented in the GUI. And it used to talk about a "PIN" instead of a passphrase/password, but the "PIN" can (with some gpo tweaking) contain letters/space/punct as well as numbers.