Chrome does not allow scripts to access files on a local filesystem unless you specifically tell it to do so by starting it with --disable-web-security as an argument.
See http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=40787 for a discussion (and a lot of frustrated people).
To simply start an arbitrary HTTP server to serve up files in a directory I use python's SimpleHTTPServer. This works on most Linux and Mac boxes as they package python along with the distribution or the OS.
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
This serves the files off the current folder under port 8000.
